bluGill

Self hosting will always remain a hobby thing. Most people won’t give the time need to properly admin their own system and an improperly admined system is a risk that you don’t want to take with your precious data. I can’t blame people for not doing this - there are ball games to watch, saw dust to make, kids to raise, and millions of other things to do with your free time such that you cannot do everything you might want to. Sure most people could learn to do this, but it isn’t a good use of their time.

What the world needs is someone trustworthy and cheap enough to handle data for people who have better things to do. Which is why I have fastmail handle my email. I self host a lot of other things though because I don’t know of anyone I can trust to do a good job for a reasonable price.

Ubuntu has gone downhill a lot in the last decade. I no longer can recommend it. Yes there is a large community, but they make too many questionable decisions and so doing anything “different” will be hard.

You can run docker in docker. I do that all the time (but via scripts so I know it does docker in docker, but I don’t know how they do that).

But again, I wasn’t even trying to run HA in docker, I was running in a VM container and still the above is refused by default.

Maybe, but the documentation says it can’t be done.

note too that I wasn’t running docker but instead a vm.

https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/ Home assistant container - the version for docker - doesn’t support add-ons. If you go through a lot of effort you can make it work, but you won’t get help. (easiest is to install some linux in the docker and then home assistant supervised on top of that)

There is no reason HAOS couldn’t run just fine in a container (qemu not docker), but they intentionally detect that and break it (I tried, I probably could make it work but I don’t have that much time)

Home Assistant insists that it must run on bare metal hardware and will not work well. This is a purely artificial limitation that home assistant puts on you. You can work around it with a lot of effort, or the limitations might not matter to you, but it is a limit to be aware of. I personally went to OpenHAB instead, but YMMV.

Since you have Proxmox why would you switch? If you don’t like it, then by all means, there are lots of other options. However there is a good reason Proxmox comes up a lot. (I don’t personally use Proxmox so I don’t know those reasons, but the people who recommend it give every indication they are smart people who understand the problem and so I trust them enough to say it is a good option)

Best is a subjective question. There is no objective way to say what is best. We can argue about pros and cons. We can argue about what we prefer. However that is all subjective and there is no one best answer.

Ann reason you choose authenik? There are a nmber of options and I’m not sure why to choose one over the other.

Pi’s built in audio is terrible. Even if it works you will want a better audio interface. The PI only has digital inputs (I think there is a mic input), so you need something to get audio in. If you can get the digital audio that is best, but often that is behind encryption and so you end up with analog inputs. (I’m not sure what the options here are, worth looking deeper).

Once you have the audio in, there are a number of Jack (which port audio supports) to network low latency products that will work. Configuration will be hard but that is something you only do once. (configuration is hard because almost everyone who uses this wants a different complex setup and so there is no way to make it easy in a way that would help anyone else)

I was thinking about restoring the backup in a temporary location and running diff on random files to check the files match the source, but I don’t know if this is redundant now.

That isn’t as useful as you would think. If your computer fails there are high odds you will restore to a fresh install of a newer OS and newer software/services versions. Which means that you really want/need to also test data/config migration.

OTOH, if you have backups odds are the data is there even if you never tested them. Testing you can restore is mostly about do you have everything backed up. Your backups can pass all the validation but if you accidentally configured them to only backup /tmp (or something else worthless) you may as well not have backups. Thus you should test that you can do a full restore just to make sure that the data you want is all there. I generally trust that backup software can restore all the data you pointed it at without problems even if you didn’t test them - but I don’t trust that you (or I) configured them to backup the right things.

most of the work is getting media. I spend many hours ripping cds, getting track titles right (popular music this is automatic but I have a lot of obscure cds where this can’t be done). there are ways to download music, but again you will spend time doing that.

movies are even worse in part because there often isn’t a legal way to do things and so even if you have the rare legal movie things are tricky.

Back in the 70’s my dad worked for controll data - I think when Cray still worked for them. One day uniforned military came to the lab he was in with a failed haredrived handcuffed to them (i’m guessing this would have been a 14 inch drive?). They watched while the lab opened the drive to find physically warped platters, then used rags to wipe the oxide off, took the rags tothe parking lot and burned them.

not sure how practical that is for you but it was once the standard to be sure.

Spring break so nothing this weekend. I need to figure out backups and then common passwords/logins for my family.

I use magic mirror for that. I tried homeeassistant but I’m alleric to a million PIs and they make installing any other way hard. (Rant about vm versions not supporting extentions)

what is thisyarty thing

I tried home assistant in docker. Easyetoeget working but for some unknown they make it hard to install extentions so I couldn’t get some things working.

i installed openhab instead which works though there are less extentions available.

Email is often impossible. you can run your own server but you won’t be able to send email to many people because gmail and other larre providers will ignore everything from any ip address you can get. you endeup with email for only people on you server and the what is the point.

just a warning there. Some do self host email but it is the most difficult to host. My life is much better now that I pay fastmail to handle my email.

Start small. The hard part isn’t installing a lot of software and getting it running. The hard part is keeping everything updated over time. So install one interesting service, and then figure out how the update process goes before installing another. Hopefully the worst thing that happens is you install services and use them only to have the computer fail in a few years after you depend on them and you can’t figure out how to get the data into the new version. There is also the very real possibility that your service is compromised by an attacker.

I name them after a female important character in whatever novel I’m enjoying when I set the system up. Back when I was single the female was important, now it is just tradition.

Since I like fantasy there are plenty of names available that are both pronounceable and nonsense.

My NAS is behind a firewall and doesn’t normally run the types of things you would compromise. (no web browser). They need to break many things at the same time to compromise it. I’m not saying it would be impossible to compromise my NAS, but is is very unlikely just because of how difficult it is. If I’m target of a state level attack I’m sunk anyway.

though offline backups are always a good idea. However they by definition need several days to restore (if they take less than that they are too easy for an attacker to target)