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solidgrue

@solidgrue@lemmy.world

I’m just this guy, you know?

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solidgrue ,

If you just want each physical interface on your server to participate in a single VLAN, set the corresponding switch port as an access port in the desired VLAN, and then configure each
server interface as a normal untagged interface.

You would only do tagged frames (802.1q trunking) if you wanted to support several VLANs on the switch port.

Best Buy Membership "discount" (lemmy.world)

So I was shopping with my wife today and I said "oh let's see if my membership helps out." So we went and added the same item to each of our carts, and to our surprise, the total was the same! So what is it exactly that I'm paying for in this membership if the items "original price" is higher for me than it is for regular...

solidgrue ,

TIL people still shop at Best Buy.

If you want to get fleeced but still be respected the next morning, shop Monoprice or NewEgg.

Jeez. Best Buy? Just shop like you deserve to be treated like a carpet.

solidgrue ,

Wrong question.

Is NewEgg any worse? Too close to call.

solidgrue , (edited )

It's mainly about managing risk, but also not all ISPs allow residential accounts to host services on their IP addresses.

Opening a port to the internet exposes the service to the whole internet, which means you need to secure the service with strong credentials, set up SSL, manage the certificate, and keep software up to date. You incur a lot of extra work, and also extra risk not only to your self-hosted service, but to any other services you host that "trust" your service.

All that work requires extra knowledge and experience to get right which, let's just be honest here: we've all probably followed that one How-To blog post, and maybe not understood every step along the way to get past that one pesky error.

Running a secure VPN overlay like Tailscale has much less overhead. You generate some keys, and configure your lighthouse server so the enrolled devices can find each other. It effectively extends your LAN environment to trusted hosts wherever they might be without exposing any of the services to the Internet.

Overall, Tailscale is simpler and much less work for individuals to set up and maintain than to secure multiple services against casual or targeted intrusion.

Tailscale also has the benefit of being a "client" in the view of the ISP, who see your IP address reach out to your VPS to initiate the tunnel, and not the other way around. If there's any CGNAT going on, Tailscale would tunnel through it.

solidgrue ,

Its not exactly lightweight, but the Netdata integration will get you all of that.

Securing Netdata itself can be a bit of a chore, and then the integration requires creating sensors of interest in your configuration.yaml file. Have a look, it might be an interesting project if you're up for a challenge.

Curious to hear what others are thinking too.

solidgrue ,

Either an ESP32 BLE proxy via MQTT with a Tile-like beacon in the backpack, or a cipher lock with a Kid Code are probably the most straightforward solutions.

If you have Frigate NVR set up, there's a project called Double Take that does facial recognition. Looks like a bit of work and needs training, but it could be a fun project.

solidgrue ,

Definitely check in with the utility before mucking with the meter. You can find your way into a lot of trouble tampering with active meters. Chances are there's new meter tech out your utility would install, and of which you could take advantage.

Check this thread. https://community.home-assistant.io/t/smart-water-meter/451935 . You'd install it down flow of your utility meter, and would need ESP32 to read the meter. It's a bit of work, but if you're already running ESPHome, it looks pretty straightforward.

On a long shot, you might consider looking into an inexpensively RTL-SDR software radio dongle, and use rtl_433 to scan a few common frequencies the utilities use to scan their meters from the street. I happened to find my neighbor's electrical meter on a common wireless weather station frequency, and if In were so inclined, could publish it to MQTT for HA to pick up.

Just a couple of ideas. Good luck!

solidgrue , (edited )

I have two Digi WLED controllers a handful of project kits, myself.

The WLED boards drive some addressable LED strings in my living room and on my patio. They hardly count as "project" kits, but learning about interfacing TTL logic with the LED driver boards was a helpful experience. I learned a lot about the different GPIO uses and modes.

For the project kits I've built, I've been focused around presence and environment sensors. Using esphome I've successfully built PIR (AM312) + mmWave radar module (R60A) presence sensors, natural gas detectors for kitchen and basement utility areas, and a water leak sensor for the laundry area. I had goals of building a 5-in-1 presence sensor, but you can buy products for those now; its a solved problem.

I've been considering a design for a sump pit depth gauge because that sounds like useless information that I'd like to have for some reason.

I'll probably get interested in energy management soon, and will look into current clamps and tracking usage at smart receptacles.

solidgrue ,

I've had an Ender 3 in my cart for months and just can't quiiite justify pulling that trigger. One of these days, tho.... Any day now.

solidgrue ,

Sure. Think of it like Lego bricks or one of those 1000-in-1 electronics kits. These kits don't do anything specific, they're building blocks you use to address a need you have in your home automation vision.

The ESP32 kits are just an ESP32 development board (mine are WROOM boards from Freenove) which has the microprocessor, headers breaking out the IO pins, and a "loader" module that facilities uploading code and is used to power the device with a USB cable. The boards also have onboard WiFi and Bluetooth radios. The -CAM variety has a low profile header to seat a small camera module (included). Look for "Freenove ESP32 WROOM" on your preferred online marketplace.

There are several ways to interact with (program) your ESP32 boards. The easiest and most straightforward is to use the ESPHome add-on in HA from the HACS store, along with the companion integration. The ESPHome add-on provides a software ecosystem of drivers and functions for a laundry list of hardware devices you can use in your project-- sensors, switches, lights, speakers, etc. The ESPHome wiki is sort of a catalog of supported peripherals you can easily use in your build projects. Many times, you can substitute components or extend an existing component driver. Mostly you assemble your components and the controller, and then write some YAML do tell ESPHome what devices are plugged into what pins. ESPHome more or less handles the rest.

The ESP32 integration creates HA devices and entities of the devices and sensors in the ESPHome add-on for use as triggers, conditions or actions in automation.

As for my specific doodads:

PIR is a Passive Infrared Receiver. It monitors its field of view for a change in infrared light (heat) which indicates a "hot.blob" has entered or left its field of view. The model I use, AM312, is designed to signal a change in IR light by raising a signal pin to +3 volts, which has applications in presence detection. It is fast, but not accurate. It also tends to "go blind" when the hot blob stops moving, and can be subject to false positives when the HVAC kicks on or by dappled sunlight

The mmWave radar is a Seeed R60A 60Ghz radar module. This particular module is optimized for human presence detection and fall detection. It uses millimeter wave radar to acquire and track humans in its field of view. 60GHz gives enough resolution to detect heartbeat, respiration and micromkvements like fidgeting. It talks to the ESP32 over the I2C bus (a digital IO bus similar to USB). It has advantages over the PIR sensor because it actively tracks its targets and can even tell if there are multiple people. Its less prone to false positives from environmental changes and smaller animals. Unfortunately, it can take several seconds to acquire a target and begin tracking it. In a presence application, a human could walk across several steps into the field of view within that time, giving the impression of a slow response.

Using both sensors in a presence application is a sort of belt-and-suspenders approach. You can compare the state of both sensors in your automations to determine presence with greater accuracy.

As for learning HA itself: we all started in a similar place not even knowing what we didn't know yet. You sort of poke and play and build some bad automations. Then you start to research new projects and start to learn what you don't know yet. That's OK: its a roadmap to future knowledge.

In my rig, I use HA to solve problems or address nuisance situations around the house. Wife and kids are forever leaving doors open with the HVAC on. I programmed HA to watch the HVAC (ecobee thermostat) and the states of the windows doors. If a door gets left open for more than 10 minutes, HA starts flashing lights as an indicator for someone to check notifications. After 20 minutes of the door/window being open, it turns off the HVAC and sends a push notification to my phone that someone is being a dumbass.

Another one is to shut off the basement lights at 10pm because the kids never remember to after they're done gaming down there.

Eventually you want to do.more sophisticated things, and that when the rabbit hole gets real deep.

solidgrue ,

My sump pit is pretty shallow, and is dry about half of the time. My challenge is that the sump is on a float switch which doesn't activate until the water level is just about an inch (15mm) below the bottom of my slab. It doesn't take much of a delay for it to overflow.

There are three sensor types I'm aware of: a resistive "dipstick," ultrasonic distance gauge, and a bathymetric depth gauge.

The resistive dipsticks are only about 6in (15cm) in length, and would be good to determine if the water is within that distance of a target water line. I would position it on the side of the pit with the effective upper end set some buffer below the top surface of the slab floor, and possible gram the logic to alert when the water lever rises above the bottom of the slab. I would otherwise be blind to the water level if it is below Tue bottom of to sensor.

The ultrasonic sensor looked interesting, but I have pets and I try to avoid ultrasonics in the environment when I can. It also strikes me as perhaps the least reliable (or most crosstalk-prone) of the sensors because it has a larger field of view, and might be fooled by the equipment in the pit.

That leaves the bathy sensor. Its basically a diaphragm and a pressure sensor you screw to a waterproof housing, and submerge. Placed near the bottom of the pit, it would read the depth of the water by the pressure of the column above it. Most accurate, but also the most expensive. Last I checked, the sensor itself was US$60 on the usual online markets.

Ultimately I'll probably do a length of copper pipe with a 90 elbow and a cap. I'll drill and tap a port through the cap and thread and seal the bathy sensor into it, and feed the wire back up the pipe to the controller. I'm not sure if there a driver for it in ESPHome, but if nothing else I expect I can probably just read the analog voltage and alert on a set point.

I haven't really fleshed it out as a design yet, but that's what I'm most likely to do.

solidgrue ,

Stupid sexy Dr. Mrs. Girlfriend

solidgrue ,

I'm in IT in a healthcare-adjacent sector. Never underestimate the motivation or tenacity of foreign state actors, organized crime and chaotic neutral hacking collectives. You have limited time and budget, and both financial and risk based approval processes to deal with. They have time, ideology¹, and financial incentives.

You can't win in the face of that.

¹ sometimes it's hacking for hackings sake, but more typically it's to disrupt critical services and extort modest capital to go away. Rinse, repeat, make that bank on volume.

solidgrue ,

3x3 AoE on a natural 15 or better

solidgrue ,

I was lucky enough to see Bruce Perens speak at Linux Expo in 1997.

Egads, that was a long time ago. O.o

solidgrue ,

Many (if not all) of the KeePass clients are better than Lastpass, LogMeIn or any of the hosted solutions. More portable too

solidgrue ,

KeePass works off of a local data store which you can sync up to the cloud, so you don't even need Internet access flto open your credentials store

solidgrue ,

Ah, that I did not know.

So it's an equivalent to lastpass for portability. My mistake.b

solidgrue , (edited ) 
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/audio bs=2
solidgrue ,

10^20 monkeys, 10^5 years

solidgrue , (edited )

I do this, but I also work in tech and have a pretty solid grasp of routing and how that all works. I agree it may seem overkill for many installs, but makes sense for certain use cases. I'll try to explain without writing a book. I'll be glossing over a LOT of texture in the following...

In networking, a router is considered to be a node in a graph with multiple host IP addresses, one for each edge. It has an interface-- sometimes physical but more often viirtual-- on each edge (network segment, VLAN) that connects to it, and which usually serves as the gateway IP for that edge. In larger networks where there is more than a single router, the routers must all tell each other which router has which destination network segment, so they all speak a routing protocol like RIP, OSPF or IS-IS. Each of the speakers must be able to identify itself uniquely among the others so the others know which node is making what advertisements. To do this, they each are assigned a unique router ID, which is normally a 32 bit integer value represented as a dotted quad. Customarily this is an IP address, and the protocols further this idea by adopting the highest numbered IP address on the device or the addrss of its loopback interface, if defined.

The point of a routing protocol is for the participating nodes to advertise IP ranges associated with their connected edges. They assert advertisements for each edge when it is active.(I.e., the interface is UP) and withdraw or expire them when the edge is unavailable (I.e., the interface is in any state other than UP). Every time an edge changes state-- goes from UP to not-UP, or not-UP to UP-- that advertisement must propagate across the whole system, and every node must stop forwarding traffic to recalculate its own best path to the remaining available edges. This is called reconvergence, and network engineers try to do things to minimize the number and frequency of these events.

Practically, one of the things network engineers do to try to avoid instability is not having the ID of a speaker change dynamically. Going back to how the device selects its router ID, it considers the loopback IP first, or else the highest numbered IP active on the device at the time of evaluation. Edge interfaces can go UP or not-UP for any number of reasons at any time, thus they are less than ideal to use for the router ID. The loopback interface by contrast is always up. This interface is typically assigned the IP the routing protocol will use for its router ID.

In practice, the loopback is the only interface on a router than can be said to belong to the router itself¹, and not to an edge connected to the router². There are other practical reasons in routing to do this, but they all come back to the fact that the loopback is always up, and therefore it's always apt to be advertised as an available edge.

So what does any of this have to do with servers, applications and self hosting?

Applications that provide services over the network, DNS servers for example, need to bind to at least one IP address and protocol port. On servers with multiple interfaces, these applications normally bind to all available interface addresses, using the address 0.0.0.0. In some situations this might be undesirable. Maybe you don't want your pihole serving your internal DNS to your ISP, or maybe you have several VLANs at your house and want to use a single IP address for DNS across all of your VLANs, or you don't trust the VLAN interface IPs to always be the same.

Adding an IP to the lo interface ensures that IP is always available and reachable. It provides a single place for all hosts in the system to go that isn't pinned to any one of the possible VLAN interface IPs.

In my own home setup, I define several IPs on the loopback for different containers that all want to use port 8443/tcp for their public port. This gives me the flexibility of being able to assign different services their own IP (which I can then reference by name in DNS) on their native port vis-à-vis the documentation. So my Pihole container has its address and my Unifi controller container has its own as well.

Anyway, this is very much a Done Thing in the industry. Not everyone needs it, but its a useful technique in the right circumstances.

  1. Considered from to perspective of graph theory, network nodes and the edges they connect are distinct things. A router participates in a LAN, but the LAN is its own thing, and not formally part of the router.
  2. In large IP networks, there are frequently tra sport topologies like VLANs or other shared.media that connect two or more routers, and are used exclusively to distribute traffic among themselves. Which of the participating routers is said to "own" that advertisement?
solidgrue ,

I appreciate the pun!

For home networks, I agree there's usually not a need. I do it for portability reasons: I always use 192.168.0.0/24 addresses (192.168.0.0 - 192.168.0.255) for services I'm hosting on prem at home. In general, my home router is a Linux box connected directly to my ISP's network on one interface and a switch with several VLANs on its other interface, and which has IP forwarding enabled with IP masquerade. I also use IPv6 a fair amount and receive a healthy whack of addresses from my ISP that I delegate out portions of to each VLAN. By my count I have 6 or 8 active VLANs on my home net for the adults, for work, for the kids, for the central services, for isolating untrustworthy IOT doodads, for infrastructure management, and for guests.

Most of my so-called central services have been hosted on the same Linux box that does the routing, using containers bount do tjose subnet zero IPs on the loopback. It skeeves me out a bit to do that though, so I've been moving that stuff over to a new applications server in a DMZ VLAN. I know what I'm doing, but I'm also incurring unnecessary risks having structured my service hosting the way I have.

The IP-on-loopback trick let's.me move those services from a VIP on the router to an IP on the new service host without having to reconfigure everything. I just fake in some /32 routes where I need to, and the traffic goes where I want of to.

I admit up front this isn't great discipline, but as I said I know what I'm doing and it only sounds crazy to me when I try to explain it to other people. Lol.

solidgrue ,

A painful lesson to be sure, but also perhaps an opportunity to spruce up or rethink some of those original automations and integrations. I've been messing with my own rig since the lockdowns and while it's not exactly a mess, per se, I certainly know more now than I did then. Refactoring your code is rarely a spontaneous activity.

Also, I'm checking now and oops, syncing backups off-box broke thanks for prompting me to check!

solidgrue ,

HAOS on bare metal x86_64 here. No issues to report

solidgrue , (edited )

Not really productivity services, but to name a couple,

  • Google One (extra storage, bonus YouTube Premium & YT Music premium)
  • MXroute for mail hosting (used to self host)
  • Amazon Prime (for the shipping, the content is a bonus for us)
  • Hulu (kid's gotta see that ONE show... 🙄)
  • Lemmy.world (via Patron)
  • Couple of YouTube creators and app publishers I enjoy regularly (via Patreon)

I'm considering joining Nebula because many of the creators I frequently watch on YouTube are setting up shop up over there, and I'm getting irritated with YouTube for how The Algorithm is affecting the quality and content of the infotainment channels I enjoy.

solidgrue ,

I've been hearing good things about Kagi.

Google search got so bad I use DDG by default now, but that seems to be Bing by another name and itself seems to be deteriorating.

solidgrue ,

You know? That might have been the case. I was an old Google Music subscriber, and I think when that rolled over to YT Music the subscription package bundled in YouTube premium. Later when I bit on the Google One subscription later, I think it was on a promotional offer. I remember it was about $100 at the time, and it aligned with some storage needs U had so why not?

I just looked and it seems the Google 1 and YT sub's are billed separately. It was a while ago and my memory is hazy, but I'm into Google services for about $30 a month these days, and that's what I pay for.

solidgrue ,

Same here. YT family plan, and $99/yr for the G1 storage (plus other benefits, but mostly the storage)

Massive Thank You

I've been at this self hosting stuff since Christmas and at every step of the way, I've come asking for help and advice from this community (and the related ones) and everyone has been super generous with their knowledge and guidance. I am extremely humbled by the kindness you have all given me. Shit, I'm even grateful for when...

solidgrue ,

The best way to say thank you is to pay it forward. Always be mindful of the time when you were the new kid, and freely share your knowledg & experience with the next new kid behind you in the spirit of community.

Geek on!

solidgrue ,

I maintained an ejabberd server for myself and a few friends for many years. The config language was a little arcane to me at first, but it was pretty solid after I got it set up. I used a couple of different client apps with it over that time, most of which are still available on the F-droid repo. It was fun, but got annoying when the server needed maintenance, or was down, or because of any of the other minor nuisances that come along with maintaining a service for others to use.

Eventually we all ended up just moving over to Signal because it was just as good from the view of cost-benefit and risk for us. We're just trading stupid memes and Saturday night stories among ourselves. The most radical thing we might organize is a trip to Vegas for the week.

Definitely try it out, but consider that being a comms provider for others is always a bigger chore than it seems at the outset.

solidgrue ,

I hear you. The desktop wasn't Signal's primary market, and that's pretty clear in their implementation. On the other hand, that difficulty registering a desktop servuce may make it less attractive to would-be bot farms and spammers. Its a thin one, but I see that as a silver lining.

solidgrue ,

No, we all only ever used single mobile clients. Sorry I can't help

Roku has patented a way to show ads over anything you plug into your TV (arstechnica.com)

A patent application from the company spotted by Lowpass describes a system for displaying ads over any device connected over HDMI, a list that could include cable boxes, game consoles, DVD or Blu-ray players, PCs, or even other video streaming devices. Roku filed for the patent in August 2023 and it was published in November...

solidgrue ,

Maybe not the solution you were asking for, but the Nvidia Shield on the stock code has been a fair compromise for me. The ads on the main screen are relatively unobtrusive, and sometimes even vaguely relevant to our viewing preferences. We largely watch Hulu, Prime and YouTube+ (with free access to AppleTV and Netflix, but I haven't set those up yet). For ads, we pretty much only deal with Amazon's new advertising in included Prime content. We'll probably stop viewing that content once the series we're currently watching wraps.

For context, my daily driver phone is LineageOS which is rooted all to heck to smack down intrusive advertising and tracking (Magisk, AdAway, AppManager to disable in-app trackers, uBlock on the browser, etc...), and my home network uses a pihole for DNS and malware blocking. I really hate advertisers.

On the pihole, the Shield is actually only the #3 top offender of blocked requests, behind my wife's work laptop and my kid's Steam rig. The main offender on the Shield was the ESPN app, which I removed because I never really watch sports outside of tye idd division game, which most of the time I meet friends out at the local pub anyway. Otherwise the Shield has been a well behaved appliance.

So it's not the perfect ad-free experience, but its hardly the advertising dystopia of broadcast TV.

solidgrue ,

How do you edit or delete categories once you've created them?

To be sure, I'm using the companion mobile app and don't see an obvious Categories editor. I haven't explored the desktop UI fully for this question yet.

solidgrue ,

Ah! There it is! Thank you.

Still a bit broken on mobile, but they'll catch it up.

solidgrue ,

I'm not buying one primarily because they are expensive to repair, have terrible in-cabin controls and ergnomics that I feel make them mile-for-mile more dangerous to drive than a traditional control layout, and have a lot of "fine print" terms & conditions that make a purchase unpalatable for me. It's a shame really because they're quite innovative vehicles otherwise, and they are fun to drive.

Touch controls and feature subscriptions are non-starters for me in any vehicle though. Add in that Musk is their CEO and forget it.

Musk is a self-correcting issue though. The board will oust him once the share price drops enough. If it can happen at Boeing, it can happen here too.

solidgrue , (edited )

Not many 3rd party shops are qualified to work on Teslas, so repairs are generally performed at the dealers who are on balance more expensive. You've been lucky so far to have warranty coverage, but what would your out-of-pocket costs have looked like if you had to cover to cost of those repairs yourself?

How long do you intend to own and drive your Tesla, and what do you anticipate future maintenance and repair bills to look like?

Traditional internal combustion vehicles burn fuel and require regular maintenance that electrics don't. They also suffer mechanical wear & tear, and need regular maintenance, oli changes, fuel, etc. Back of the envelope math: over 100,000 miles, or say 10 years of light to average driving, you are apt to have 330 fuel fill-ups at $55 per, maybe 30 oil changes at $65 per, 5 sets of brakes at $225 per, maybe an odd $3000 in other wear & tear maintenance or a major repair. Call it $20-25k in over 10 years for cost of ownership. If you drive more, you're apt to see those costs go up. (eta: Not accountig for things like taxes, insurance, registration fees, and other wear elements like wipers, tires, and the like as they're probably a wash between IC and EV fleets)

I'm not nearly as familiar with ownership costs of a Tesla, but I do understand that there are probably fewer maintenance expensss because there are fewer moving parts to wear. The power plant and braking systems are electrical and suffer less mechanical wear, fueling costs are shifted to electric costs which are obscured by other supply costs and usage, and the fleet is young enough that most major repairs are still under warranty.

But, when do those warranties expire, and what do you the consumer do with the vehicle after that? Is there an aftermarket? A buyback or trade-in market? If you plan to "drive it into the ground," then how many miles can you expect to get out of your Tesla before you have to buy a new car? Will an extended warranty be an option?

At that point, what does an out-of-warranty battery replacement look like? I've heard it can be between $4000 and $10000, a significant portion of the cost value of the vehicle. How about a dead touchscreen? That's a major component for the vehicle. What about the maintenance fees for software upgrades for those systems? (eta: or ongoing software support?)

I may have made your argument for you, but I also hope I've demonstrated that potentially significant ownership costs may simply have shifted later into the life cycle. You may still have to bear them if you can't offload the vehicle.

What I hope isn't the answer is that these cars are all destined for scrap after their first owner. I buy my vehicles to drive for a long time and plan to offload through private sale or for parts. I don't know that I'll have that same luxury with Teslas, let alone the current fleet of EVs and HEVs.

edits: typos, mostly

solidgrue ,

I'm betting that what really happened is that they screwed up their planning, possibly because some chunk of the potential buying population doesn't want a Tesla anymore.

Like an X-factor, would you say?

solidgrue ,

I've been moving my stuff over to Porkbun from Gandi after Gandi updated their ToS and changed their pricing structure.

solidgrue ,

TSA still won't let them through, but the airlines will be more than happy to sell you a small tool kit containing a 6oz ball peen hammer, pop rivet gun, an assortment of rivets, flat & Philips #2 screwdrivers, and a 3m roll of duct tape. They'll be available on the service card for $28 (please make sure you have the latest version of our app, and have a credit card on file!)

Also, they'll be passing along a new Enhanced Egress cabin fee for upgraded deplaning experience.

solidgrue , (edited )

Edit: derp, I didn't read all the words. Yes, you're overdrawing your smart plug with inrush current fron a large inductive load. Look for a smart plug rated for at least 20A. It'll be safe enough to use on a 15A circuit because the breaker will be the limiting factor instead if the plug.

Check the amperage and wattage rating on that plug. Heavily inductive and some resistive loads can draw a large "inrush" current during startup that can briefly exceed the capacity of some smart receptacles. Chances are it's rated for 10A resistive load, and a washer (which is an inductive loadl can briefly exceed that.

For example: halogen lights. A halogen light tube like you'd use in floodlights or those old floor-standing torchiere are tyoically rated fo 150 to 300W. That rating is derived from the bulb's filament when it is up to ita operating temperature, which is something like 1000°C or more. A hot filament has a higher resistance than that same filament when it's cold, so that 300W element might briefly draw over 600W instantaneous load while it's coming up to temperature, briefly drawing potentially more than 15A at 120V. It doesn't pop your breaker because they have a sort of time delay that can accommodate these brief, large inrush currents. Electric motors in pumps and drives have a similar effect, but that's more from their inductance/capacitance as they spin up, rather than a change in their resistance. Their "apparent resistance" is actually AC inductance, which can draw significantly more amperage when the motor is not spinning at its designed operating speed. Same thing for compressors like in air conditioners, fridges and ice makers.

Most ZigBee smart switches and receptacles are rated for 10A at 120V, or total 600W continuous load. They're designed to handle smaller inrush currents from loads like incandescent bulbs, LEDs, and small electrics. They're generally not rated for things like halogen bulbs or large motors.

Washing machines are an interesting case because they employ several motors to drive the agitator (or drum), the spin cycle and the drain pump. They have a highly dynamic cureeebt draw that depends on both startup inrush, but also on the torque demanded for varying cycles. A heavy load if jeans or towels can draw significantly more power to agitate and spin dry than a lught load of bed linens or delicates.

I bet your smart plug is rated for 600W, and probably says not to use on halogen bulbs. (Most do.) If so, its also not going to be suitable for your washer for substantially the same reason: peak draw exceeds its capacity.

For higher draw applications, you'll need to look for a 20A or 30A rated smart switch. They're available on AliExpress at least, and possibly Amazon as well. I can't recommend any for you because I don't use them, myself. Look for ones that are designed for window or wall Air Conditioning units.

Anyway, you're not likely to be able to solve your problem with your current kit. It'll have to be an upgrade or a rethink.

Good luck!

solidgrue ,

By the math you are correct. I blew out some switches that were 10A, 120VAC peak, but somehow only rated for 600W continuous, resistive. Amazon doesn't sell them anymore, but it would be printed on the housing if that's the case. That's why I was saying to look.

My switches might have been the "no neutral" variety, though those are a special kind of janky.

solidgrue ,

They're like the Lincoln & Ford (or Acura & Honda, if you prefer a less ambiguous simile) of the electrical components world

solidgrue ,

Im not familiar with the Asterisk integration ilself, but I'm generally familiar with HA and community addons to ask if this isn't that big a deal? If I'm interpreting the pull correctly, HA is dropping the native integration for a mailbox feature that only Asterisk uses, which technology itself is outdated. Looks to me like the Asterisk implementation itself is a HACS resource, and not part of the HA mainline code.

Could be the case the Asterisk community project maintainers will either update their code to live without the native feature, or adopt the deprecated code to maintain it as part of the community add-on.

The corpo-speak seems pretty straightforward to me, though: the asterisk-mbox integration code is unmaintained, outdated, or has fallen out of compliance with the prevailing API usage so it's planned for being removed from mainline. Happens frequently with legacy code in large projects.

I wouldn't bring out the pitchforks just yet, OP. Good chance the Asterisk repos will update with a fix or a workaround in the coming weeks to months

solidgrue ,

What your situation for data backup? You mentioned a homelab and a NAS, are you running regular backups to an off-box store? You could mate it with a few TB of inexpensive USB disk, maybe some software RAID, and use it for off-box backups. Doesn't have to be fast, just reliable.

Specs like that, you have some options. Virtual assistant, IPCam NVR like MotionEye or Frigate, media server for your car (takes DC voltage, right?), weather base station, ADS-B feeder, smart mirrors.

Or (if you're in the US) you could repair it and then, if you donate it to a suitable charity, you could take the the cost of the repair as a deduction on your taxes. Probably doesn't help you that much, but it could maybe really help someone else who needs it.

Or, just wipe it and send it to e-waste.

solidgrue ,

Its peer-tp-peer in that it can be configured in multiple modes on a peer by peer, interface by interface basis. You can make point to point, hub & spoke, or full mesh topologies. If you configure one of the peers for IP forwarding, it can gateway to external networks. If you configure two peers with IP forwarding and establish some routing you can build site to site topologoes, or add more peers for site to multisite and full mesh site topologies. Add IP masquerade (source NAT or PAT) to any of those topologies and it can provide remote access VPN.

Its very flexible. Most config guides walk you through a basic remote access VPN scenario that lets remote peers access local LAN services at the one end, but not the other, and/or additionally access Internet resources via IP masquerade. The other topologies require more work, but are (edit: not) much more difficult than the remote access use case.

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