Technical

I was recently tasked with creating a small deployment to host a single virtual machine at a customer site. The purpose of the virtual machine was to provide us with remote access to a specific customer resource that was otherwise unavailable to us. The deployment consisted of two physical machines running as Proxmox hypervisors (node-1 and node-2) hosting a single virtual machine. The virtual machine was configured to be replicated from node-1 over to node-2 every 5 or 10 minutes and was added as a HA resource. Side note: in order for replication to work, you need a ZFS filesystem. If you instead are using shared storage, replication is not needed. ...

So, I’ve mentioned in a post or two that I have a home automation system running, but haven’t really talked about what it is or what it can do… Well, here’s an overview! What is it? Home-Assistant. It’s a fairly new home automation (HA) platform, that has gained a large following over the past couple years in the open-source community. Of the home HA systems I’ve used, it has the best user-interface, and works with the widest variety of smart-home devices. All of the HA systems I’ve tried required a good bit of technical knowledge to setup, but Home-Assistant is the easiest. I should note that the systems I’ve tinkered with were all open-source systems (OpenHAB, Domoticz, etc) and are not geared towards your typical home user. There are platforms out there that are aimed at the regular home user (Wink, Insteon, SmartThings, etc), but I have not tried them out. # What can it do? ...