Home Server and Self Hosting General - Technological Self-Sufficiency

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Does anyone have smart lights/bulbs? I'm thinking about tinkering with some self hosted home automation and I thought I'd start simple with the lighting. My only requirement is that it be controllable locally by integrating with Home Assistant. No cloud. I saw the IKEA smart lights recommended in an old thread here but I don't know much about this market.
 
Does anyone have smart lights/bulbs? I'm thinking about tinkering with some self hosted home automation and I thought I'd start simple with the lighting. My only requirement is that it be controllable locally by integrating with Home Assistant. No cloud. I saw the IKEA smart lights recommended in an old thread here but I don't know much about this market.
If you own or can make electrical changes, I'd personally recommend wall switches/dimmers as you don't lose super-local control or have to stick a second control next to a light switch to control the bulb. The downside is you can't make the bulbs (easily) change color.

I'm using Z-Wave stuff, because, well, it can't be cloud connected as it has no Internet. Zigbee would be similar. The risk I've seen with Zigbee is that it's open, which in this case can mean Home Assistant needs to understand each device. Z-Wave is more closed but that means devices have fewer options and tend to work the same, for better or worse.

Also, I got Z-Wave devices first.
 
I saw the IKEA smart lights recommended in an old thread here but I don't know much about this market.
Trådfri is Ikea's ZigBee offering. Their hub is difficult to use and has an unreliable signal, but fortunately you can use their lights and devices with any other ZigBee hub. The hub I use is the sonoff universal usb dongle.

The risk I've seen with Zigbee is that it's open, which in this case can mean Home Assistant needs to understand each device.
Zigbee2mqtt works much better than the zha integration, in my experience. No fiddling with quirks files or custom settings, as it's all included in the container and maintained by a dedicated team of autists. I was already using mqtt for things at home anyway, so it was a natural fit.

Z-wave only ever gave me trouble. Pity really, because there are some nifty z-wave exclusive devices out there.
 
Trying to upgrade my ZFS file server: Without going on an ECC rant, and even allowing for the degenerate state of search in [CURRENT YEAR], it's depressingly difficult to find simple information on what exact combinations of motherboard and CPU will actually give you ECC. Never mind all the 'well this and that isn't really real ECC (buffered, etc)'. All I want is something marginally more reliable than the average consumer crap, a motherboard that doesn't cost a grand, and a CPU that doesn't suck half the watts in the house. As far as drive support, it'd be nice to have M.2, but I could get by booting from USB, and my RAIDZ is only 3 drives so I don't even need a ton of SATA ports. Any recommendations appreciated.
 
Trying to upgrade my ZFS file server: Without going on an ECC rant, and even allowing for the degenerate state of search in [CURRENT YEAR], it's depressingly difficult to find simple information on what exact combinations of motherboard and CPU will actually give you ECC. Never mind all the 'well this and that isn't really real ECC (buffered, etc)'. All I want is something marginally more reliable than the average consumer crap, a motherboard that doesn't cost a grand, and a CPU that doesn't suck half the watts in the house. As far as drive support, it'd be nice to have M.2, but I could get by booting from USB, and my RAIDZ is only 3 drives so I don't even need a ton of SATA ports. Any recommendations appreciated.
I ended up with an ASRock Server board and Epyc 4465P. Not cheap but the ECC works. Most AM5 CPUs do real ECC so it's just the MB. Presumably you can troll through the CPUs at AMD's website and see which cheaper ones also support ECC.
For instance the Ryzen 5 7600,7400 and 7400f says it supports ECC. Obviously you'll need to decide on a GPU for the non-iGPU models or something like an ASRock Server board with IPMI and on-board VGA if you'll just be using it as a server. Rumor is all the ASRock AM5 boards (Server and Consumer) all do ECC.

I don't think you'll find a modern motherboard without at least one M.2 slot.
 
Trying to upgrade my ZFS file server: Without going on an ECC rant, and even allowing for the degenerate state of search in [CURRENT YEAR], it's depressingly difficult to find simple information on what exact combinations of motherboard and CPU will actually give you ECC. Never mind all the 'well this and that isn't really real ECC (buffered, etc)'. All I want is something marginally more reliable than the average consumer crap, a motherboard that doesn't cost a grand, and a CPU that doesn't suck half the watts in the house. As far as drive support, it'd be nice to have M.2, but I could get by booting from USB, and my RAIDZ is only 3 drives so I don't even need a ton of SATA ports. Any recommendations appreciated.
AMD CPUs support ECC. It's only "certified" on server/workstation processors but should work just fine. Asus and Asrock tend to support (unbuffered) ECC as well, I had it going with a 5600X and an Asrock X570M.
 
Maybe this is the best place to ask: I have a Micron 9300 15TB drive laying around (don't ask), is there any way to use it in my standard PC? I have a ton of games I would like to install. Or is that a server only kind of drive?
 
Maybe this is the best place to ask: I have a Micron 9300 15TB drive laying around (don't ask), is there any way to use it in my standard PC? I have a ton of games I would like to install. Or is that a server only kind of drive?
According to the Interwebs it's a U.2 drive. So it only works for Bono.

Or, if you have a PCIe x4 or wider slot available you can get one of these(or a hundred like them), you may need some clearance next to it since U.2 drives are a bit wide:
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There are also cards which have cables so you could use it in a drive bay if you wanted or a bunch of other options. But for a single drive it's easiest to just attach it directly to the adapter. Probably also some options for a M.2 slot to a cable to a U.2 if you needed to do that instead.
 
According to the Interwebs it's a U.2 drive. So it only works for Bono.

Or, if you have a PCIe x4 or wider slot available you can get one of these(or a hundred like them), you may need some clearance next to it since U.2 drives are a bit wide:
View attachment 8078800View attachment 8078801
View attachment 8078807
There are also cards which have cables so you could use it in a drive bay if you wanted or a bunch of other options. But for a single drive it's easiest to just attach it directly to the adapter. Probably also some options for a M.2 slot to a cable to a U.2 if you needed to do that instead.
Can you explain this in English? I'm not dumb, but when it comes to PCs I'm a caveman at this point.
 
Can you explain this in English? I'm not dumb, but when it comes to PCs I'm a caveman at this point.
Your computer has slots in it, hopefully the card will fit in one of them. You'll need to open it up and check and see if one is free, the connector on the motherboard needs to be wide enough for the card(or wider). U.2 attach to card, card go in slot.
Plenty of videos out there. "Install PCIe card in PC" would likely be a good search term.
 
Your computer has slots in it, hopefully the card will fit in one of them. You'll need to open it up and check and see if one is free, the connector on the motherboard needs to be wide enough for the card(or wider). U.2 attach to card, card go in slot.
Plenty of videos out there. "Install PCIe card in PC" would likely be a good search term.
This is a pre-built PC. Ive spent years doing it myself, but this last year I kinda gave up.
 
One of my drives is on it's way out, thank fuck I have a warranty still!

I think the main reason it's going is it had a head crash or some bullshit.
 
AMD CPUs support ECC. It's only "certified" on server/workstation processors but should work just fine. Asus and Asrock tend to support (unbuffered) ECC as well, I had it going with a 5600X and an Asrock X570M.
asus does. i was rolling ecc on an a320 board with a ryzen 3600 for my nas box for a bit till i found out its kind of a meme and sent them back to save a few bucks. If you need ecc then you could go with that route on ryzen but its kind of a waste of money ngl
 
asus does. i was rolling ecc on an a320 board with a ryzen 3600 for my nas box for a bit till i found out its kind of a meme and sent them back to save a few bucks. If you need ecc then you could go with that route on ryzen but its kind of a waste of money ngl

Everyone needs ECC and the manufacturers are cheap lazy faggots who would drain the blood from their entire family if it meant a few more sheks in their pockets.
 
Everyone needs ECC and the manufacturers are cheap lazy faggots who would drain the blood from their entire family if it meant a few more sheks in their pockets.
Need? Or want? Sure, it would be nice to have ECC on every system by default, but unless youre in a production environment its not absolutely necessary to run ECC.
 
My only requirement is that it be controllable locally by integrating with Home Assistant.
Basically any ZigBee or Zwave will do with a dongle. If you wanna stick with wifi under its own special ssid then I'd recommend shelly switches and lamps. They have good HomeAssistant drivers.

Additionally: I cannot for the life of me get a half-decent mailserver running at home. I was meaning to replace my hostinger-hosted mail with something that's mostly hosted on my homeserver (maybe proxied with Proxmox mailgate) but my brain is too smooth for it.
Is there a quick and mostly clean setup guide for it?
 
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Friendly reminder for updating Immich to >2.2.0: Beware of the OCR function.
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This is on top of the GPU it's eating alive.

Inb4 shitter CPU.
This board is a $200 aliexpress matx monstrosity, but it's probably the serverboard with the most value. I love the chinks for this.
 
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Most memory errors happen in transmission now anyways, so at a minimum you'd want DDR5 before ECC since DDR5 actually ECCs the info as its moving between the CPU and the memory (ddr4 does not)
 
Most memory errors happen in transmission now anyways, so at a minimum you'd want DDR5 before ECC since DDR5 actually ECCs the info as its moving between the CPU and the memory (ddr4 does not)
I think you have that backwards. DDR5 "non-ECC" has on-die ECC but not transport ECC unless you have ECC RAM and MB+CPU+BIOS support. The ECC RAM has additional chip(s) to provide the full ECC experience.

ECC RAM+MB+BIOS+CPU support, even DDR4/3/2/1, provides full end to end integrity.
 
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