To be honest, I used to have an ISP with dynamic addresses and it wasn’t a huge deal. The address only changed every month or two. I used afraid.org’s dynamic DNS service to get a dynamic address that followed the changes and created CNAME records for my real domain pointing at that. The actual connection was fucking awful but the dynamic IPs never caused any problems.

As for services: Nextcloud is well worth looking into for file sync and photo backup, especially if you’ve already got a file server running.

As it happens, I’ve just finished setting up a system exactly like this for a completely off-grid setup. I needed a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant to be completely self-contained to monitor an adjacent, larger system that is only powered up intermittently (close enough that the two systems have a common ground).

Short version: the Raspberry Pi and the Huawei LTE router I’m using for connectivity draw a steady 9W between them (there’s a lot of monitoring going on). I went with an old pair of 80W panels in very suboptimal positioning, a simple MPPT charge controller and a 110Ah deep cycle leisure battery which costs about €45, €30 and €120 respectively. The system has been running a few months now and the battery had never, ever dropped below 12.4V. The Pi uses WireGuard to connect to my VPS so Home Assistant can be accessed with a web browser since the network I’m using on-site doesn’t do public IP addresses.

Honestly in rare situations that a device like that needs to be accessible from the wild Internet I think it’d be mad to expose it directly, especially if it’s not manageable as you suggest. At the very least, I’d be leaning on a reverse proxy.

“Federation” is like “non-fungible token”. Everyone knows what it is, but they’ve never heard it called that.

No. Yes. Kind of.

My home setup is three ProLiant towers in a ProxMox cluster. One box handles all-the-time stuff like OpenWRT, file server, email, backups, and - crucially - Home Assistant and is UPS protected because of how important it’s jobs are. The other two are powered up based on energy costs; Home Assistant turns them on for the cheapest six hours of the day or when energy costs are negative and they perform intensive things like sailing the high seas, preemptive video transcoding, BOINC workloads and such. The other boxes in the photo are also on all the time basically being used as disk enclosures for the file server and they are full of mismatched hard disks that spend virtually all their time asleep. At rest the whole setup pulls about 35-40W.

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Hey. Heyhey. Heyheyhey. Have you ever noticed that your warships have giant barcodes on them? It’s so that when they return to port they can scan the navy in.

I used Kodi with a Jellyfin plugin for media center duties.

Consider a refurbished USFF business PC.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_nkw=usff+pc

A unit from any major brand will be good and there are i5/8gb units available for well under £100 that will happily shunt 4K video about. Plus they have the advantage of coming in a nice case, lots of ports, included storage, etc…

Honestly any parts you buy today probably won’t be much good in 30 years.

Did you know the world naïve is written backwards on your water bottle?

Three HP ProLiant servers running ProxMox cluster. Each box has a VM for Portaiber, as well as mismatch of VMs running Home Assistant OS, OpenWRT, Ubuntu, Windows and Debian, along with a Windows file server that connectes to four cheap NAS running Ubuntu LTS with a combined 20 mismatched hard drives by iSCSI and borgs them together with Storage Spaces.

It’s a fucking mess, if I’m honest.

“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” - Feddit.UK

And suspension, shocks, axel, exhaust, undercarriage…

Poor Ligma. Worst case of Dee’s syndrome I’ve ever seen.

Hiren’s PE

It’s a community-run successor to the classic Hiren’s Boot CD. It’s a live disc running Windows Embedded with a lot of customisation and loads of disk management, recovery and diagnostic tools included.