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Lifebandit666

@Lifebandit666@feddit.uk

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Pros and cons of Proxmox in a home lab?

Hi all. I was curious about some of the pros and cons of using Proxmox in a home lab set up. It seems like in most home lab setups it’s overkill. But I feel like there may be something I’m missing. Let’s say I run my home lab on two or three different SBCs. Main server is an x86 i5 machine with 16gigs memory and the others...

Lifebandit666 ,

It's the same reason I like running things in Docker; you can just wake up and read about something while enjoying your morning shit, then switch the computer on and try and boot it before that thing you're meant to be doing. If you can't do it you can just delete it and try again later.

I started Self Hosting with Proxmox 4 months ago and so far my only real snafu has been mapping drives directly to Proxmox with Fstab. If you're gonna do it, add "nofail" FFS.

I pass my drives through to my NAS VM to handle rather than Proxmox because it's easier to fix my NAS if it fucks up using Proxmox, than to try and fix a none-booting Proxmox.

Anyway now I'm at a point of stability and dim sat thinking about redoing it bare bones, but I love tinkering so I'm sure this is just the plateau before I discover something new to play with, so I'm keeping Proxmox

Lifebandit666 ,

I've had a usb to sata running to a 2.5" sdd that acts as the main storage and boot for my pi4b, and it's been in use for 4 years with zero issues so far.

I've now got 3HDDs attached to my Proxmox machine for NAS storage via usb ATM. It's been running since Feb. It's had it's issues but those were more my fault for not understanding the flake factor (since my experience with the sdd) I had one drive forget what I named it, so my whole Proxmox died.

But that was remedied by passing the USB straight through to OMV.

Just saying, I've not really had the same experience as you with them, they seem fine if you have an idea what may fuck up.

Lifebandit666 ,

I'm currently in the market for a music server myself.

I want it all, I want something that will fire music at my Google home links, and also some raspberry pis with speakers, and also serve to my phone in the house and away from it.

I have Logitech Media Server running ATM and for a long time, but it is, and always has been a bit hot and miss.

I have a music file system in OMV which I can access on my LAN. This is the source of music for LMS. But I also have Plex pointed at it

This allows me to play the same music from any TV or phone with Plex on it. Plex even have an app called Plex Amp. I use Symfonic though, I liked it enough to buy it.

These apps give me the option to cast my audio to the Google Homes minis I have, I need something for my Pis.

Another advantage I recently found of adding my music library to Plex is I downloaded a program called MediaMonkey to stick music on my old iPod that I have in the car. It picked my Plex library up straight away, although to its credit, it also found my original music Share, it just didn't advertise the fact.

I use Plex myself but there's Emby and Jellyfin to look into too.

Is it practically impossible for a newcomer selfhost without using centralised services, and get DDOSed or hacked?

I understand that people enter the world of self hosting for various reasons. I am trying to dip my toes in this ocean to try and get away from privacy-offending centralised services such as Google, Cloudflare, AWS, etc....

Lifebandit666 ,

I've self hosted home assistant for a few years, external access through Cloud flare now because it's been so stablez but previously used DuckDNS which was a bit shit if I'm honest.

I got into self hosting proper earlier this year, I wanted to make something that I could sail the 7 seas with.

I use Tailscale for everything.

The only open port on my router is for Plex because I'm a socialist and like to share my work with my friends.

Just keep it all local and use it at home. If you wanna take some of your media outside with you, download it onto your phone before you leave

Using HA to start my work laptop

No major question here, just thought you might find this interesting. It's an example of the kind of (off-the-wall) things you can do with HA that aren't immediately obvious. When I was starting out with HA, I enjoyed reading these examples, because it gave me ideas for my own setup. And, I wrote many automations that should...

Lifebandit666 ,

Yeah WOL was one of the first things I looked for in HA because I just didn't have all that much in the way of Smart stuff.

Anyway nowadays I have an automation you may like. I have set up a little wireless dock for my phone on my desk. It's the only wireless charger I use, so using the Companion app sensors (namely the charger type) I have set up an automation that turns on my PC when I dock my phone.

Meaning I literally flop down on my chair and put my phone on the charging stand and the PC turns on.

Now when that PC is picked up on the network HA will turn on my monitor (via a smart plug) and my desk lamp.

I also have a program on the PC that detects what I'm doing, and can switch the PC off!

So I can add switching the PC off to my automations, like my Goodnight automation

Lifebandit666 OP ,

That was the idea! I came across it looking for something else. I've been using a blueprint for a while (since you haven't even looked yet) that will pull when the alarm is sounding and snoozed and such.

I have moved back to Node Red and made it myself there now though. What I use it for is I set the alarm to ramp up volume after 3 minutes, but the alarm also triggers my lights turning on.

Since the lights usually wake me up I usually have a silent alarm clock, meaning I don't wake The Wife at 5am when I get up for work.

My son heard about it so now he also wakes up to the lights coming on.

You can use that to start your morning automations if you're so inclined, so when your alarm goes off and the Kitchen motion sensor is triggered for your morning cup of Joe, you can fire your morning reminders and traffic info

Lifebandit666 OP ,

This looks like a good shout. I have actually tried it out but it was years ago when I was trying to get a Sonos-like service and ultimately settled on Squeezebox.

Maybe it's time to try it again, thanks for the idea

Lifebandit666 ,

Try a live Proxmox USB, it's what I did when my machine went unresponsive. Allowed me to look through the logs of the OS when it hadn't booted to find out what went wrong.

For me it was that I had put my USB HDDs in via Fstab and one had died, which made Proxmox unbootable until I hashtagged the lines out in fstab.

Lifebandit666 ,

Eh I did all this with a cheap thin client.

Proxmox as the frontend

OMV in a VM with usb passed through

Debian VM for Plex and Docker

Adguard and Nginx and Arr in Docker

Network sharing from the OMV VM

HDDs to USB.

Lifebandit666 ,

It's a Dell Optiplex 7050

I need help with my first home server. Permission/ownership and samba issues.

I have been using linux for a couple of years already, very casually, just browser, media, games. Recently I bought dell micro pc and installed proxmox on it. I don't have a lot of hdds or raid or anything, just one 6tb usb external drive. I know, I could lose everything, but I don't have anything important in there, just media....

Lifebandit666 ,

I've solved this exact issue and numerous others with samba / CIFS recently. This is how I have my Proxmox on a mini pc with usb mounted HDDs at present:

1 VM Home Assistant OS, not relevant really

1 VM OMV Open Media Vault.

1 VM Debian with Docker installed.

So in my experience over the last few months you want your usb drive to have absolutely nothing to do with Proxmox. Nope.

I had 3 hooked in mounted in Proxmox and when one of them threw a fit Proxmox refused to load.

Better to have a NAS VM installed and have the drive(s, I have 3, 2x1tb and 1x750gb) passed straight through, whole usb, to the NAS VM.

This means if the drive fails Proxmox doesn't break, and also in my experience with OMV, it'll still run if a drive breaks

Then what I did was set up the shares and made them samba in OMV then set my other VM, the Debian one, with mount points in the Fstab.

The key for me in this endeavour was to make sure the Fstab entry made sure that the OS wouldn't fail if it couldn't find a drive, as happened in Proxmox, so I made sure "nofail" was somewhere in the Fstab config.

For Samba to work in Linux you need to install cifs-utils, then add a line in /etc/fstab. Mine goes:

//omv.local/sharename /mnt/filename cifs credentials=/etc/cifs-credentials,file_mode=0777,dir-mode=0777,auto,nofail,vers=3.0 0 0

You have to create the mount point mkdir /mnt/filename and give it permissions with chmod

You also need to made the cifs-credentials file in /etc/

It needs to contain:

username=yourusername
password=yourpassword
domain=WORKGROUP

Then what I do for Audiobookshelf and whatnot is mount the mount point as directories in Portainer under the volumes:
- /mnt/Downloads:/Downloads

Then in the UI of the service I'm using in Docker I can use the Downloads folder and it's the mount point.

This is what's working well for me. If a drive fails I try and fix it in OMV instead of trying to plug a monitor into my mini pc to try and work out from the logs why Proxmox has failed...

Use this comment as a framework for your research and save yourself some heartache. You can mount the CIFS/Samba share to Proxmox and use that, so you can still use the drive in Proxmox for backups and such

Networking Gear Recommendations? (starting from scratch)

Hi, I hope its appropriate to ask this here, considering this is the most active community closest to this topic (Networking). I am moving places shortly and will need to start from scratch will all networking equipment. Including router and wifi-extenders. Am wondering what the general consencus is around networking gear, what...

Lifebandit666 ,

My budget-friendly solution has been to replace my ISP provided router with a 10 year old Netgear router that handles all the protocols my ISP does off eBay for £25.

I have a 4 storey townhouse so having this on the ground floor is useless when you're on the top floor.

So I have a power line system installed which I've hooked into the modem. I've got a wired router in the front room that has all the front room tech worked in.

On the top floor I have an even older Netgear router a friend gave me, with OpenWRT installed plugged into the power line and running as an access point.

In total this whole system has probably cost me £80 to fully install as I was given the older Netgear.

Works beautifully, cost very little, and I've got a Guest Mode ap that turns on when I turn guest mode in Home Assistant, a simple "Hey Google turn on Guest mode"

What tips or resources would you recommend to someone who knows about Linux and wants to self-host, but has no experience self-hosting?

I have several years of Linux experience and I know how to fix my own problems, and I have experience self-hosting using Docker and Docker Compose, but I really feel that I don't know how to self-host and that I just copy and paste commands without understanding it, I would really like to learn how to self-host by myself but I...

Lifebandit666 ,

I went Proxmox when I was in your shoes a few months ago.

It installs like a Linux OS so you already know how to do that.

You get a webui to work from.

From there, YouTube is a massive help. Watch videos on "how to install WHATEVER on Proxmox" and just replace WHATEVER with whatever you want to prod until it works.

My first service was Home Assistant, which I already ran on a Pi. I had that fully migrated in a day giving me a spare Pi.

Next it was Portainer, and used that for Adguard and Uptime Kuma, and then I got fancy and threw secondary servers of those services on my pi and put that on the network as a fail over.

So yeah, just install it and try to do shit, YouTube is your friend.

Lifebandit666 ,

Over the last few months I've made a whole bunch of different combinations of VMs, LXC and Docker until now, where I have Home Assistant, a NAS and a Debian server which I deploy docker stacks into.

At one point I had about 15 different machines I could spin up, but now it's just the 3. The great thing about Proxmox is you can just create and destroy to your hearts content

Lifebandit666 ,

So you're trying to get 2 instances of qbt behind the same Gluetun vpn container?

I don't use Qbt but I certainly have done in the past. Am I correct in remembering that in the gui you can change the port?

If so, maybe what you could do is set up your stack with 1 instance in, go into the GUI and change the port on the service to 8000 or 8081 or whatever.

Map that port in your Gluetun config and leave the default port open for QBT, and add a second instance to the stack with a different name and addresses for the config files.

Restart the stack and have 2 instances.

Lifebandit666 ,

Holy shit I totally thought I was talking out of my arse lol

Lifebandit666 ,

Sacrifice the Lion for the good of everyone? It comes back from the dead... Not ringing any bells?

Lifebandit666 , (edited )

I call this feeling "The Holy Spirit" and no I'm not religious, hear me out.

So there's "The Father" which is you, in charge of everything.

Then there's "The Son" which is your Jesus, the bit of you that does shit mostly perfectly without any input from you. The scary example of this is when you drive to work and can't remember the drive at all. Jesus Take the wheel. Teach your Jesus right and you can trust he'll do things fine.

Then The Holy Spirit, which is that part of you that sees everything, before the filters are applied, and let's you know something is off. There's no obvious reason for it, but there's something off about this guy and we need to get away from him as soon as possible and never interact with them again.

The Jesus part is the important bit for most of us. Learning to play the guitar? Teach your Jesus. When you've practiced enough you can just trust that Jesus will hit the notes while you concentrate on singing along.

When I learned to Juggle I just taught my Jesus how to throw properly so it lands in the other hand.

At work I teach my Jesus how to do the manual labour, do the checks I need to do, and I can concentrate on ripping on my work colleagues.

Lifebandit666 ,

This actually sounds like what they're doing at Home Assistant.

Buy a HA Yellow or whatever, plug it in to your network and turn it on. It loads up and you log in on a web page on your phone. Install an app, sign up for Nabu Casa and get your services working outside the network.

And it'll pick up a lot of what's already on your network and set it all up for ya.

Lifebandit666 OP ,

Yup exactly that.

I only figured it out after fine tuning for hours to try and stop it. But the fine tuning I did while I was getting interference has actually made espresence better.

It was bouncing around stations a lot, but by turning the absorbsion up on the station in my front room it's sorted all that out and now it's accurate.

Lifebandit666 OP ,

I believe the other comment is correct, there's 2 ways of adding Bluetooth presence, one is espresence which I'm using and the other is a less feature filled version in esphome.

I have done a lot of moving my esp boards around though to improve it. They seem to work better when they're in different locations.

So for example I had one at the top of my stairs but I've moved it across the room, further away from the one on the floor below which was at the bottom of the same stairs. I also moved that one into a room and higher up because it was interfering with the one on the floor below that.

And that one I moved to the other side of the room, and the one on my ground floor has been dropped to floor level instead of sitting at waist height.

Point being, if you're putting it onto already placed sensors, ymmv

Lifebandit666 OP ,

Anyone wondering about tuning:

Absorption is the amount of "stuff" between 2 base stations. Increasing the value seems to "attract" Bluetooth to it.

So if you're sat next to a station and it's saying you're nearer another, increasing absorption seems to help with that.

Best Local Smart Lock for Privacy/Security

I’m solidly leaning towards a Schlage Connect Lock due to its local only Zwave capabilities (which has the benefit of also extending battery life). I was strongly considering the Aqara U100 for its many features, but based on what I’ve seen I can foresee it being a nightmare to get working locally with home assistant and the...

Lifebandit666 ,

The point I think is that while most locks are really easy to pick relatively, the people that it's really easy to pick to, aren't the same people robbing your house.

The ones that sit and practice picking the locks are the ones that install them, or come out when you've misplaced your keys and get you in the house.

The robbers are mainly opportunists that wander around looking for open doors and windows, knock to see if you're home then try to force a way in.

Lifebandit666 OP ,

The ld1115h. Best thing is it's much better than the aqaras and cost about 2/3 the price. It was free shipping over £8 so that's around what it cost to make.

Lifebandit666 OP ,

Meh I'm still 25 in my head...

Lifebandit666 OP ,

Haha it's my shoulders and neck that lets me know.

Lifebandit666 OP ,

Let's not mention the nose and ear hairs that grow 3 times faster, or the greys that multiply

Lifebandit666 OP ,

Espresence, it tracks Bluetooth and guesses which node it's closest to, it's guesses are really good

Lifebandit666 OP ,

Yup espresence

Lifebandit666 OP ,

Meh, disagree.

Lifebandit666 OP ,

Wouldn't even have to be ninjas tbh, but yeah fuck it, ninjas!

Lifebandit666 OP , (edited )

For anyone else wondering how I'm keeping track of who's where, https://espresense.com/

I tried Room Assistant a year or 2 ago and it SUCKED. I have a 4 storey townhouse and had 2 nodes running Room Assistant and I could be stood next to 1, two floors away from the other and that's the one it said I was closest to.

The idea is that by detecting the strength of the Bluetooth signal, the node with the best signal was closest, but it just didn't work (for me).

Anyway espresence is better, especially because I've doubled up and I bought 4 esp32 boards with pins off AliExpress for under £12, and arrived within a week.

You connect the little chip to your pc and flash a firmware from Google Chrome, then hook it into your WiFi, go to its page and give it a name, and hook it into your MQTT.

4 boards later I have a node per floor.

Next I added our phones to it by pairing them to it, then deleting the pairing on the phone. Add the Bluetooth connection to HA config and you're away! Well...

So you have to connect what the boards say to what it means in HA yourself. You get "bedroom" off Espresence and have a Bedroom zone but you have to put the pieces together yourself.

I ended up making binary sensors for each room in Node Red. Did I leave the room? Who else is there, nobody? Ok mark it clear... You could just make helper switches and use them but I was feeling fancy. I've already posted recently about the Binary sensor.

But once you've done that, you just base your automations off the state of the switches you made.

So the age old "The front room motion sensor stopped detecting, should the lights go off?" question, now becomes...

Huh I must have stopped typing there...

...much easier to solve. I can still have the old "TV on?, wife's laptop connected to Bluetooth?" bits in, but having Bluetooth presence detection AS WELL makes it much more reliable, for a measly £12

Lifebandit666 OP ,

Now you've got me wondering what marshal art Armish Ninjas would learn.

Like where I'm from in Yorkshire the marshal art is Ekky Thump, and in Scotland they learn Fah Kyoo...

Kung Plow?

Lifebandit666 OP ,

You pair the device to a base station once to create an entity but you don't have to if you know the mac of your phone. So there's no pairing involved in the tracking.

You can use the HA app to create a beacon on your phone when you're on your home WiFi and not pair anything, just plumb the id into HA.

The speed is quite fast but there is still a lot of false positives. I've sat and watched mine and my wife's phones just pinging around the house, but if you add some "for X seconds" to your automations it becomes much more stable.

I've got 3 android phones and an iPhone tracked at present

Lifebandit666 OP ,

The secret is not caring it's 4m away as long as it says you're closest to that one. It's not accurate, it's a guess made with software.

As I've said I've sat at my PC on the front room and watched it say I'm in my bedroom and kitchen.

So for example my front room lights are based around an input boolean. They're triggered on by motion but back off by whether the TV is on, my wife's laptop is connected to the WiFi, the pc is switched off, and everyone's presence is not in the front room. I already did all that and now I have presence as well.

It used to be that my wife would be sat there on her phone and the lights would go out, now because her phone is on her person they stay on.

Like I say, they're not perfect but they are better than not having them.

I don't think I'll ever have my music follow me around the house.

Oh also try instead of basing automations around whether you are in a room, instead use "is not"

So for example when I get out of bed and get up for work by bedroom lights come on with my alarm. When I go downstairs and make a brew I am no longer in the bedroom so my automations turn off the lights in there. Is not "bedroom"

It's triggered by the motion sensor outside my bedroom door, then it waits for my presence to be anything other than bedroom. Since I'm moving around the house it'll trigger at some point.

Similarly my sleep automation turns off when the bedroom is no longer occupied. But that's when my wife gets up 2 hours after me. It's also triggered by motion, but then waits until my bedroom presence sensor no longer reads anything

Lifebandit666 OP ,

Yeah I have a million Bluetooth devices picked up but I've only put 4 of them so far into my Ha sensors. Fuck knows what the others are, but we have soany devices in the house that I can't keep track, then there's the neighbours' stuff too...

Interestingly I stumbled across a YouTube short yesterday about hacking an android device from only knowing it's Bluetooth Mac address, so theoretically I could really piss off my neighbours if they drove me to it.

Lifebandit666 OP ,

Yeah you certainly need more than one sensor. I have one per floor

Lifebandit666 OP ,

Just coming back in to say that yeah, now I've used it as a primary trigger instead of a secondary check it seems I'm all over the place in Bluetooth land...

I don't have a motion sensor in my bedroom. I do have an old phone on a charging stand that I use as a Smart Clock, and the camera of that can be used as a motion sensor. It's pointed at my head when I'm in bed so it's not in an optimal motion sensor position... Just setting the scene for you.

Now I had an automation that turns bedroom lights on based on motion so when I wake up in the middle of the night for a pee I have a lamp that turns on for five minutes.

Well of course I wanted MORE from this extra from my clock, so I've added presence in the room as a primary trigger of my lamps.

I'm stood in my room watching my lights popping on and off again every 30 seconds...

Not great as a primary trigger, more a secondary check.

Anyway I'm gonna try and change it by adding "in room FOR 30 seconds" to my sensors, seems to be helping so far.

Also limiting reporting distance in the settings for each node to 4-6 meters.

Or maybe stop trying to use it as a primary sensor lol

Lifebandit666 OP ,

how do you know when to send the notification btw? Did you configure some automation or script that just says how long until notify?

When power drops below a certain wattage I figure the cooking it complete. I've set it to 20 because it seems my air fryer drops to 24W every few minutes (when it's reached temp I guess) and my rice cooker drops below 50W when it's on the Keep Warm cycle.

So above 50W it checks the room and below 20W it calls a notification from the people that were in the room.

Also, as a minor annoyance, I could only flash the board from chrome when connected to a WINDOWS machine which I find pretty nasty 🤢, but I may be in the minority there.

Yeah I was a Linux-boy for a decade before a friend gave me a gaming PC he made out of spare parts for me. His one stipulation was NO LINUX so I'm stuck with Windows. But I get ya.

Lifebandit666 OP ,

Don't know why you've been down voted but don't worry I put you back up to positive.

Your toaster automation sounds like what I had to do with the old dishwasher. It would finish the cycle but not stop, so it would continually try to keep up to temperature for some reason.

So I had my notify automation for when it was done and then I had it switch off when the power dropped.

Minor inconvenience to that setup was having to turn it back on again when I wanted to use it. I didn't wanna have to go under the sink and wade through all the shit in there to get to the plug so I used Google "Hey Google, wash up"

But we have a new one now so I can leave it on.

I also have the washing machine notification. At present it announces when the motion sensor in the kitchen picks up movement and the washer is finished, and sends a notification to the phones in the house when the announcement is made with "I emptied it" and "Ignore" so you walk in the kitchen, get shouted at to empty the washer and a phone notification.

But I am planning on having the same presence detection pick up who triggered the motion sensor and only notify that phone, just haven't gotten around to it just yet

Lifebandit666 OP ,

Just hooked my HA into Google Assistant so it can see my devices with this https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/google_assistant/ then made a Google automation to match the words to turning the plug on.

Lifebandit666 OP ,

I already have motion sensors everywhere but I also have cats. They make it seem like there's people wandering around the house all the time.

I've placed a lot of them on top of door frames that seem to miss the cats, but in the front room there's sofas for them to climb up on which means they still get picked up.

I have also since this post purchased MMwave sensors. But they're worse for picking up the cats.

So what I'm trying to do is add more sensors so HA has a better picture of who is in the house, and when.

To give you an idea, yesterday I took my wife to a Dr appointment, my kids are at their grandparents, but when I was sat on the car waiting for Wifey I noticed my kitchen lights were on in the app.

The Drs turned into the hospital and I was out for a good 4 hours, but got home and added "Is anyone home?" to my lights automations.

The cats don't need lights

Lifebandit666 OP ,

Yeah I've kinda found the sweet spot now to be fair, but I'm using an esp32 board and some dude's yaml, so I've been groping in the dark a bit

Lifebandit666 OP ,

I've just come back to this comment to get sabnzbd running, thanks again

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