Open source software like Zigbee2MQTT and Home Assistant are a great alternative to (more or less) closed systems like Philips Hue. It can be tricky to get started though. Here is a quick start guide allowing you to use all the advantages like full offline control and the possibility to Read more…
I love my Grafana dashboard to see everything important in my smart home on glance. Using rows and the modern time series panel makes it even better. Let me show you how I updated my dashboard. Grafana dashboards Grafana is this awesome open tool to create dashboards. I have set Read more…
InfluxDB (1.8) is a great database but it logs every web access as an error by default. This creates a lot of error entries in a log aggregation tool like Loki. There is a simple fix though. Loki & log aggregation Loki is a great tool to aggregate logs from Read more…
If you run the supervisor version of Home Assistant (or Home Assistant OS) a backup solution is built-in. If you prefer the more flexible installation via Docker there is no such solution. Here is how to keep regular backups of your Home Assistant configuration when running it in Docker. Running Read more…
Building a DIY smart home needs a good set of software tools to write code, monitor your devices and update data. Here are my favorite smart home tools. Over the years I have used quite a lot and those turned out to be the best for the job so far. Read more…
ZFS is a great filesystem for your server. Until something goes wrong. I wrote a small ZFS alert script that sends me a popup notification if my ZFS pool ever goes offline. The ZFS filesystem ZFS is a very robust and versatile filesytem that includes many features like snapshots, RAID Read more…
Let’s encrypt, the biggest free provider of TLS certificates recently issued a warning to renew als TLS based certificates. Here is how to force a certificate renewal if you are using Traefik as a reverse proxy. Traefik and let’s encrypt I already wrote about my home server setup using Traefik Read more…
If you have not heard about the Log4j2 issues then it is time to act! Secure your selfhosted service right now or risk loosing all your data. Here is what you can do. The issue with Log4j2 Log4j2 is a logging library that is widely popular in the Java world Read more…
The digital, paperless future is coming closer and closer. When I was looking to go digital I ran into one major problem: automatic upload to Nextcloud. The automatic upload from your scanner makes digital copies of your documents available everywhere – but only to you! It turns out that his Read more…
Hosting your own services is pretty simple with Docker. Making services available everywhere via the web can be tricky. A reverse proxy is a flexible and safe solution for this problem – and Traefik is a reverse proxy build to be used with Docker and docker-compose. Here is how I Read more…