this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024
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I had it briefly up and running and can only say... it's a bear, at least if you are trying to use it as a drop-in replacement with existing hardware. I'm sure I'll go back and sort it out at some point, but it left me just feeling tired and frustrated even when I had it doing most of what I wanted.
If you were thoughtful about hardware from the ground up, maybe it would be more straightforward, but I tried getting it running on just an old workstation with ubuntu installed on it that I use for very basic stuff like syncthing and it was just painful. Mix of Kasa/Wyze/Philips devices that are just what I've somehow collected over time.
It would be nice to see better first-class add-on support. I found myself needing to SSH into a VM to get stuff into it, and even then it was twitchy in all the wrong ways. Would also be nice to see better support for the containerized version, because that's so much easier to distribute and execute compared to a VM. Next time I'll probably just try to do it all with docker and see if it hurts less, since I don't think any addons I was using were critical to begin with.
That said, if you're doing HA, get a dedicated piece of hardware for it. I suspect it vastly simplifies things.
I installed it in a VM that's running Unraid. It was pretty simple to set up that way. The hardest part was figuring out how to pass through the USB controller to the VM. Side note: if you're building a home server, you should look into getting an extra PCI USB controller so you can dedicate them to different VMs if needed (or leave one for the host to use).
For routing to the open Internet, there's a handy addon in HA to connect to Cloudflare Tunnel. It works great. The only catch is you need a domain name registered with Cloudflare. Of course, not needed if you only want to control it from LAN-connected devices.
If you don’t want to deal with remote access hosting (which can be pretty involved), their cloud service Nabu Casa is $5 and this is exactly the functionality it provides - they don’t host your instance (you still need somewhere to run it locally, like a Pi or one of their devices) but it tunnels your instance out to their managed hosting and you can access it from any Internet connection.