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…
Grafana is an awesome tool to visualize your smart home data. It gets even better if you create a dynamic dashboard though. Change the datasource for a set of diagrams with one click – easy, show all values of a certain type in one diagram? – possible! All of this Read more…
To host services on your own server you need a simple way of running them. A great combination here is Docker and docker-compose for running your services. After some initial setup this combination is very simple to use, easy to extend and really powerful. This is how I run my Read more…
Having backups of your servers data is essential. But what if somethings goes wrong with the backup process? An automated backup check can be an incredibly important tool. I wrote a small script to check for new backups on my ZFS based server and notify me if any are missing. Read more…