Homelab

This comes directly from the archwiki, due to I got tired of mount the nas shares using dolphin (or similar) and have to go to the /run/media.... path everytime, or by manually running: 1 mount --mkdir -t cifs //SERVER/sharename /mnt/mountpoint -o username=username,password=password,workgroup=workgroup,iocharset=utf8,uid=username,gid=group Instead, I will just manually run: 1 systemctl start mnt-nas.mount Or enable it to mount it automatically during boot and to unmount I just have to stop the service. ...

Since I installed Proxmox for my small home server, I struggled a bit with nas shares due to user ownership and permissions, but after searching a bit I encountered a tutorial (I can remember where) to do it easily. So, before I forget it I will write here how I nailed it. It works to share a mountpoint from Proxmox to the LXCs, so if you have an ssd/hdd in that directory, it will share the whole disk. ...

As a Coffee lover… of course this post had to start that way. I have a dumb coffee machine for my morning coffee on my way to work. It is just an on-off coffee machine, the brewing cycle last around 10 min and then it just keeps warm the jar. Wouldn't it be a good idea to make it smart so the coffee will be ready when I wake up? ...

I bought a sonoff mini r2 with the intention to automate my bedroom light. It requires a neutral wire to work, so it was quite difficult to use in my room due to light is connected in a two way switch and it does not have neutral wire. Eventually, I sorted it out by pulling a neutral from a plug close to one of the switches. However, in the process I screwed it up… ...

If you started to install smart devices, you realized that you need apps to manage the devices. The more popular are Tuya, Smart life and eWeLink. However, they come with a drawback: They rely on the third party cloud, if you loss internet connection you won't be able to control the devices. In order to solve that you can re-flash the devices with another software. In other words, override the software of the device which will allow you to control the device locally. I'll discuss some I've used just for put them in your radar. ...

Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. HomeAssistant is basically an OS (?) where you can add all the IoT devices (e.g. smart switches, cameras, smart led lights, sensors, TVs, etc.) of your home, to be controlled locally from a friendly UI, with ability to create automations to be executed at specific times and/or events. I will just cover the basics. ...

Previously, we spoke of how easy is to set a mesh network between your devices with tailscale. Usually, that will work for most of the people, but in the view that you are using a third party server that might log your activity you would probably want to avoid that and maybe self host the mesh management (there are huge communities that like to selfhost this kind of services of their homelab). Luckily, headscale exist as An open source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server. It has support for most of the OS's ...

Duck DNS is a free service which will point a DNS (sub domains of duckdns.org) to an IP of your choice. In other words, you can create: yourverycoolandawesomewebsitethatnooneknowsabout.duckdns.org that will point to the ip of your homelab or VPS. Why? Well, I already wrote about how to access remotely to your homelab using the Tor network. Also how it can be simplified using Tailscale and to avoid sending data to tailscale servers you could use headscale to selfhost. ...

If you have a server, you know it is useful to have information of your server to troubleshoot and detect problems or bad configurations, usage of the CPU, ram, network and health of the HDD. There are plenty of options: monit, monitorix, munin, Netdata and Grafana (coupled with one data collector like: collectd, influxdb, Graphite or Prometheus) Despite Grafana is one of the most popular choices, I decided to use Netdata, since it is pre-configured out of the box and it does both collect data and create graphs displayed through a http server. It is lightweight that will only require 1% CPU usage and around 12 MiB of RAM (at least in my OpenWrt router). Munin is my second choice, but decided to go with Netdata just because it just worked fine after install without too much hassle to configure. ...

Recently I wrote about how to use the Tor network as a free VPN and how to make as secure as possible in the Tor a hidden friend to SSH your home network entry. However, I recommended to use WireGuard to connect securely and fast to your home network if you could set port forwarding on your router and leave Tor as a last option, since it is slow and its main goal is to serve as a circumvent censorship tool rather than a VPN. ...