If you are running Home Assistant and wish to increase its security by using a FREE trusted SSL certificate from Let's Encrypt, then you are in luck! This post will walk you through the entire process. The process is quick and easy, assuming you already have a public domain via...
For the last couple of years I've done a yearly My Dream Desk Setup post, where I go into great detail about my home office setup. One way that I've kept the desktop so clean is by mounting key peripherals under my desk using custom offset mounting brackets. This post...
Today, on June 22, 2023, Proxmox Virtual Environment 8.0 is now out of beta and has been released to the public. This post will walk you through an in-place upgrade of Proxmox VE 7.4 to 8.0. Proxmox is a very popular virtualization platform for home enthusiasts to run their servers on....
One the most important aspects of maintaining Home Assistant is regular backups. Implementing the 3-2-1 backup rule with Home Assistant is now easier than ever, with the 2023.6 release. The 3-2-1 rule states you should have (at least) 3 copies of your data (production + 2 backups), on two different...
A very popular NVR solution that integrates well with Home Assistant is Frigate. It provides fantastic object and person detection from your camera streams. The Frigate project is a Docker container, so it's easy to deploy. You can run Frigate within Home Assistant, but I prefer to run it in...
Matter, the promised home automation wiz kid, is here and some devices are now shipping with native Matter support. But what if you want Home Assistant and Apple Homekit to control the same matter device? What if you don't have a Thread radio on your Home Assistant server? No problem! This...
Sometimes when running Ubuntu you need to use a different kernel than comes with the default installation. Only upgrade the kernel if you have a specific reason, such as needing a new driver or CPU support. But if you are an advanced user and know exactly what kernel you need,...
Brand new to the market is the Aqara FP2 WiFi human presence sensor. It is one of the most exciting smart home products to hit the market in quite a while. It is the successor to the Aqara FP1 which was only officially available in China. This post guides you through...
If you are in the market for new mini-PC to run some services in your home such as Home Assistant, Plex Media Server, Grafana, InfluxDB, Docker containers, or more, this post is for you. I will cover three Beelink mini-PCs that all support Proxmox and can run a variety of...
This post covers deploying a Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) and using a Synology NAS NFS mount as a datastore for backups. And optionally you can run the PBS server as a VM on your Synology NAS as well. Why would you want to use Proxmox Backup Server? Here are a...
This post covers how to migrate a Plex Media Server (PMS) running on Synology DSM 7 to a Proxmox Plex Server LXC. This Plex LXC will then NFS mount your media library from the Synology, so your large media library remains on Synology. Why would you want to do this? Well...
In this post I cover how to setup a Plex Media Server (PMS) LXC on Proxmox with hardware transcoding and HDR tone mapping. Contrary to popular belief, the Plex LXC does not need to be configured with PCIe passthrough for the GPU. So NO Proxmox IOMMU host configuration is needed...