spacewave @ spacewave @lemmy.ml Posts 0Comments 11Joined 6 mo. ago
Hey quite a few questions which would each require a detailed answer, I will just try to share my thoughts and experience...
First of all, raspberry pi: Which Model exactly? 3B+? 4? How much RAM? In my experience, self hosting on a raspberry pi for a small number of users (1-3) works for most applications. Make sure to use a good power supply and regularly backup your MicroSD card and it will run for years without any problems. You might need to use a USB Hub with external Power supply if the HDD uses to much power for the pi USB ports. Also enable spin down while idle. Research a little about disk format, for Linux ext4 is a good start, but formatting a disk generally deletes all files and you must consider if the file system needs to be compatible with other then Linux like windows or Mac...
Regards the choice of software for photo backup:
In my experience nextcloud is good for file syncing, but not that good at browsing large photo collections. Also the mobile apps are not that nice to use, but that's my opinion.
I would recommend to take a look at Immich which runs also very well on a raspberry pi, has great performance ux ui and mobile clients.
Regards Operating system: Yes, a clean fresh install with newest raspbian (=raspberry pi os) is recommended. You should enable ssh for remote management so you don't need a monitor and keyboard connected to the pi.
I would also recommend using Docker and Docker-compose to install nextcloud and or Immich, its easy to maintain, update, migrate and restore.
Also you should get another HDD for backups, data corruption, bit rot and human errors are happening so you should backup manually every few weeks.
These are just some thoughts and by far not complete or the only ways but it may help you start. Also watch some videos or follow tutorials to get familiar.
Kind regards and have a good journey into the self hosting hobby, its great, you won't regret it as long as you are willing to learn new things.
Altough you are right about this and I do also still have a zigbee network for these purposes, I did observe range, repeater, and stability issues. For light bulbs, which are not battery powered, there are more options to consider :)
I just want to kindly share experience: You might want to consider not making the bulbs smart but rather the wall switches. So you can still use the switch and also Automate it. If you should consider this, there are sonoff zigbee switches, but my experience with zigbee is not the best to be honest. I would rather recomment shelly wifi switches (IMO scaling and maintaining a smarthome wifi is much less pain and more reliable than zigbee.
This might not answer all of your questions and I only have very small number of cameras, but I would recommend to buy any IP Camera that supports RTSP and then create a seperate VLAN or LAN for the cameras to not be able to phone home or anywhere else. I actually have a complete isolated smarthome network using a opnsense Router and it works Quite well and at least feels safe.
Another way could be to invest in unifi / ubiquiti cameras, they have a good Reputation. Integration in frigate or homeassistant I dont know.
Its always DNS
The shelly Sensors are really nice.
Finamp, very polished, actively developed and cross Platform. Requires a jellyfin instance. But thats a nice diy project in it self, can only recommend
IMHO there is no perfect solution for this, but I switched to Searxng (which can be selfhosted) and Im happy with the results. Please note that Searxng is a Meta Search engine, that basically means its using multiple other search engines with less tracking afaik...
Are the external USB drives using a external power cable or just USB power? To me it sounds like you are hitting the Pis USB Power limit. You may want to get a cheap external USB dock with dedicated power supply