Tailscale is great. You should use it. Most of their code is open-source. Their coordination server is closed-source, however there’s a self-hostable open-source reimplemention called Headscale if you want a fully-open-source Tailscale stack.

Tailscale is a peer to peer VPN, meaning there’s no central server like with OpenVPN. Systems on the VPN connect directly to each other. You can also use Wireguard in this way if you configure it as a mesh (every device on the VPN has every other device configured as a peer, and for each pair, at least one of them has the port open and forwarded). Tailscale is more reliable for that as it uses several NAT traversal techniques, so you don’t need to open the port and it works even if both ends are behind NAT.

Immich doesn’t rely on Tailscale; you can use any VPN. They don’t recommend exposing it to the public internet at the moment though, which is why you’d use a VPN. In general, never expose anything publicly unless it absolutely has to be (like a website that anyone can access). For giving access to friends, you can share a device with them via Tailscale and configure an ACL so they can only access particular services on it.

For the drives, I’d recommend ZFS instead of Ext4 or NTFS. ZFS can detect bitrot and corruption using checksums, which neither Ext4 nor NTFS can do. NTFS isn’t recommended unless you’re running Windows Server, but you already said you’re using Proxmox.

IMO, use Syncthing instead of Nextcloud, unless you’ll be using all the other apps that come with Nextcloud (calendar, office tools, chat, etc). Syncthing does one thing and it does it well, which is almost always better than using software that tries doing a large number of things. Consider Seafile too.

For backups, I’d recommend Borgbackup and Borgmatic. Get a cheap storage VPS to store it. You should be able to get a deal for less than $2/TB/month during the current Black Friday sales. Check LowEndTalk for deals.

Unfortunately it looks like that one is for Apple devices, whereas I use Linux on desktop and Android on mobile.

There’s some, but I haven’t seen any that have the main features Plex and Plexamp have:

• Cross-fading when playing random tracks, but gapless playback when playing an album in order
• Analysis of the music using a local neutral network, such that you can tell it to play play “similar” sounding songs to the current one
• Automatic playlists - liked songs, decades, etc
• Downloads for offline playback
• Multiple libraries, for example I keep regular music separate from DJ mixes
• Equalizer with presets for common headphones

And probably other things I’m forgetting.

Thankfully CGNAT isn’t as common in the USA as it is in other countries. In the US, ISPs generally either offer native IPv4 (most of the major ones), or only use IPv6 and provide IPv4 at all. The latter is the case with a lot of the mobile carriers, especially T-Mobile. Your phone only gets an IPv6 address, and their network uses 464XLAT to connect to legacy IPv4-only servers.

Do you have a CVE for this?

Plex still has the most fully-featured music streaming app (Plexamp)

Prices rarely, if ever, go down in a meaningful degree.

In 2011, there was a large flood in Thailand that impacted ~40% of hard drive manufacturing. As a result, hard drives significantly increased in price. This was back when SSDs weren’t mainstream yet.

A year or two later, when manufacturing capacity was restored, prices were essentially back to what they were before the disruption.

Apart from disruptions like that, HDDs, SSDs, and RAM have always been going down in price.

Hmm, it’s missing the Docker repo. Check in /etc/apt/sources.list.d and see if there’s even a file for it.

I’d connect vis SSH and manually inspect the files that it’s supposed to be creating. Does apt update show any errors?

I didn’t realise that the Pi 5 has an NVMe hat! Is that what you did? It’s a great solution.

SD cards are mostly designed for use cases that do very little writing. There’s high endurance SD cards, but those are designed for long continuous writes (mainly for dashcams and security cameras). Home Assistant does a lot of small writes, which is the worst case scenario for an SD card.

Back when I used a Pi for Home Assistant, I had a SATA SSD attached to it using a cable like this: https://a.co/d/2tlYZW2.

These days I’d probably try a USB NVMe drive, like a SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD or similar product. NVMe drives were a bit iffy with the older Pis since some of them pull way more power than SATA SSDs and the Pi couldn’t always handle them, but it should be fine with the newer ones.

If you don’t have any offsite backups yet, I’d get a storage VPS (look for good deals on LowEndTalk on Black Friday!) or Hetzner storage box and back up to it using Borgbackup and Borgmatic.

Your ps output doesn’t show systemd as running. The only output is the grep command itself.

If you want to play files over SMB, you can just open the SMB mount in the file explorer and double click it. On Windows you can mount it as a network drive (like V: for videos) so even non-technical users understand it. I don’t understand how mpv is easier for that use case.

With systems like Jellyfin and Plex, you can (and should!) turn off transcoding when streaming at home. The only times you should enable transcoding are when:

1. You’re away from home on a slow internet connection (or your home internet has slow upload speed); or
2. You’re streaming to a less powerful device that can’t handle the full bitrate of the video.

Transcoding is very useful, because otherwise you’d need multiple copies of the same movie to handle different environments. Transcoding can dynamically adjust the bitrate based on the connection speed.

Good idea.

My dishwasher has a built-in red LED at the bottom that shines onto the ground. It turns on when it starts, and turns off when it’s done. That’s been good enough for me. Yours is definitely fancier though!

Wow, nice! I’ll have to go to one next time I’m in the LA area!

There’s Aldi in California? I haven’t seen them in norcal, just Trader Joe’s.

rtsp support

Ideally ONVIF support too, to get events (person detected, etc)

Smart switches can have instant response time too.

I’m using high-end smart switches (Inovelli Blue) and they’re great. They don’t have any of the problems of the cheap ones. You can use them with regular bulbs, or in conjunction with smart bulbs. For smart bulbs, you can pair the switch directly with the bulb.

If there’s no ground then I’d immediately contact an electrician and get a quote to replace all the wiring. The existing wiring is likely unsafe, especially with the amount of power pulled by modern devices (old electrical wiring wasn’t designed with that much power usage in mind!)

Also get them to take a look at the main electrical panel and ensure it’s okay.

My house was built in the 1960s, but the wiring was redone at some point by a previous owner. The 100 amp main panel was still original though, and it was a brand that was known for issues. I had it replaced with a new 200 amp panel.

They work well. They cost more than other options, but (at least in my experience) colours are more consistent and uniform.

Not sure if it’s still the case, but the ones I have from a few years ago use Zigbee so you don’t actually need their hub - any Zigbee coordinator will do (I’m using a PoE one, the smlight SLZB-06).

Consider using smart switches instead of smart bulbs. However, given how old the house is, you might not have neutral wires at the switches, which limits the types of smart switches you can use. Do you know if the electrical wiring is still original, or if it was redone at some point?

For the power outlets, I’d highly recommend getting an electrican to install more. It’s way more convenient than having power strips everywhere.

It was a feature built in to the web browser, providing a website, file sharing, a music player, a photo sharing tool, chat, a whiteboard, a guestbook, and some other features.

All you needed to do was open the browser and forward a port, or let UPnP do it (since everyone still had UPnP enabled back then), and you’d get a .operaunite.com subdomain that anyone could access, which would hit the web server built into the browser.

This was back in 2008ish, when Opera was still good (before it was converted to be Chromium-powered). A lot of people still used independent blogs back then, rather than everything being on social media, so maybe it was ahead of its time a bit.