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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....

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....

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)....

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....