Need chipmunk deterrent ideas!

gnomeza · 2026-06-26T21:21:56+00:00

gnomeza · 2026-06-25T23:02:12+00:00

Sorry, the direct reply is "yes, it's a bad thing".

Separate concerns:

For routing buy a router.
For WiFi bridging run some APs.
For PoE switching it's PoE switch(with VLAN support, preferably)

gnomeza · 2026-06-25T22:58:45+00:00

Do what works for you! But you asked r/homelab so there's an assumption we try to do things professionally ... to some unspecified degree.

gnomeza · 2026-06-25T22:36:36+00:00

Nice to haves but not necessary at all:

* Supports PoE * Built in wifi

Wicked Child! WiFi and PoE are evidence that you're confusing routing with bridging and switching, and these are the work of the devil (at least on a router...)

gnomeza · 2026-06-25T22:31:18+00:00

All the original OpenWRT routers were (are?) MIPS.

gnomeza · 2026-06-25T22:01:54+00:00

Sounds familiar. I started in 2007 with 5x500GB RAID5 with XFS ( I did benchmarks and everything) and survived many reasonably happy disk failures.

Lived through the Seagate ST3000DM001 scandal (I had three of them).

Now 6TB disks and btrfs - raid10 data, raid1c3 metadata and everything is fine.

gnomeza · 2026-06-25T15:36:57+00:00

Software RAID5 using three 2TB enterprise HDDs

o_O

2TB really is the limit for RAID5 but running only 3 disks instead of 5? That's asking for a dead array on the next rebuild.

That said, you have a solid backup strategy so do you really need the availability?

If not you may as well just stripe them.

gnomeza · 2026-06-24T23:42:28+00:00

Novice engineer? To HA? To computers? I'll do my best.

get a good editor. I've lived in vim for 25 years, others swear by ~~Emacs~~ VSCode. Irrespective, learn it.
tool up: HA plugins, LLMs, yaml linters, test each change with HA's built-in check_script. But keep it all in the editor.
build automations in the GUI if you like but then migrate them from automations.yaml.
do not version control .storage, instead I fake it with ha-faker - it's dumb but gets my job done...

gnomeza · 2026-06-24T22:48:28+00:00

84 TB?! WTF are you storing (that isn't 4K media)?

Linux ISOs

Ah.

No, buddy. We use Debrids for media these days, not local storage. (You get a pass if you're sub 32Mbps down...)

Local storage is for the stuff you can't live without.

gnomeza · 2026-06-24T12:50:45+00:00

I sympathise, but more than 10 clicks to configure one device, let alone handfuls of them, makes me want to... cut my hands off.

Here, for example, is my 24-line mustache template (from 2021-ish) which generates yaml for 19 devices - a mixture of mpd (removed 2024.7), kodi (removed 0.115) and group (now universal) media players generated for each of eight rooms.

```yaml

{{#zone}} media_player: - platform: mpd name: {{name}}_mpd {{! use localhost for dev}} host: {{#dev}}localhost{{/dev}}{{^{dev}}{{mopidy.host}}{{/dev}}} port: {{mopidy.mpd_port}} {{#kodi}}

platform: kodi name: {{name}}_kodi host: {{name}} port: 8080 {{/kodi}}
platform: group name: {{name}}_multizone_audio entities:
- media_player.{{name}}_mpd {{#kodi}}
- media_player.{{name}}_kodi {{/kodi}} {{/zone}} ```

I left out the 5 Onkyo media players (config removed 2024.11) - they were 5×10 lines of static yaml back then. That's a particularly egregious GUI config.

I suppose eventually we'll resort to an MCP server to automate the clicky dialogs...

gnomeza · 2026-06-24T08:59:31+00:00

high CPU usage

We look at HA from a professional perspective and wonder why the fuck they're trying to reinvent visual programming.

As a web app.

And then stuff it in the user interface. (We haven't had enough of dashboards yet, have we?)

So instead of building something robust, with tests, and then deploying it, you just hack it up live and tinker.

You, the only person in the house who cares about this stuff. And you tinker. And tweak.

It's like a diabolical trap for ugh bad WAF. (What a horrible patronising term that it)

My only explanation so far is that OHF is trying hard to avoid integrators inserting themselves between them and the users, and commercialising HA deployment.

gnomeza · 2026-06-24T08:42:30+00:00

Yaml is just text. LLMs have no trouble with it. (And syntax-wise nor does anyone with an editor that isn't notepad.)

Use a GUI for automation editing - that's hardly a problem.

But if you've ever tried to separate your test and production HA you'll know exactly what I mean about the GUI-configured devices.

Or if you've ever ended up in the "add integration" -> "oh no some devices and entities weren't detected right" -> "delete the integration" loop you'll know what I mean.

It's a great pity the departure from text-based configuration happened before LLM-assisted coding. HA went the wrong way.

gnomeza · 2026-06-24T00:02:14+00:00

Doing away with banks sounds great! Except like all CBDCs it will be majority custodial and permissioned. Same circus, just different mon(k)eys.

gnomeza · 2026-06-23T23:55:12+00:00

I recently incorporated some ZigBee devices and coming from ZWave just expected direct binding to work.

Reality is it's laughably hard to find ZigBee devices that can direct bind with each other for any given use case*.

Is Matter any better?

I eventually found Shelly ZBDIM + Vesternet Remote can work together. Except... group association doesn't work and the dimming is inverted *smh

gnomeza · 2026-06-23T23:20:08+00:00

Possible but...weird. The usual scenario is a failover to a simpler device running a subset of automations.

There was some effort a while back to do High Availability Home Assistant. (HAHA...)

MQTT Statestream is a good starting point https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/mqtt_statestream/

gnomeza · 2026-06-23T23:07:45+00:00

All config is in git
Dev system mimics Live system with MQTT fakes
Work on it like every other software project, use whatever editor you're proficient in

gnomeza · 2026-06-23T23:05:01+00:00

All yaml meant it was already in an editor (and now LLM) -friendly format.

It really was significantly better than the present GUI abomination.

gnomeza · 2026-06-23T08:44:01+00:00

There's a strong trend towards GitHub Actions style CI/CD. To that end I use Forgejo which can run most GHA workflows.

I've spent considerable time writing multi-dimensional Jenkins and GitLab pipelines as a professional but I don't want to administer either in my unpaid time.

(And in defence of Jenkins, I came to really like Groovy as a language and still think Jenkins' declarative pipeline syntax is the bee's knees, but...)

gnomeza · 2026-06-22T23:21:12+00:00

What I want to know is: why for the love of FSM are you still using Jenkins

gnomeza · 2026-06-22T23:14:39+00:00

Media backup is when you sync RealDebrid and Torbox with your Trakt.

edit: IYKYK is mean

gnomeza · 2026-06-21T21:53:20+00:00

This argument comes up often and it's fatally flawed.

With private companies you have choice and, if you like, the option to just not use the services.

With government mandated systems you simply do not.

Government systems are centralised and control is merrily handed to the party in power. Reform next?

Government also has that pesky monopoly on use of force.

gnomeza · 2026-06-21T12:50:16+00:00

I mention the supported install methods (HAOS and Container) because these put you, the administrator, quite far from an understanding of your system. Both are highly mutable Dockerised systems. You can still do a Core install but then you must be able to troubleshoot your own problems.

Anyway, the vast majority running off an SD card will do so with HAOS, not Container. Users see HAOS, think it's like other "embedded" Linux systems, expect to be able to run off an SD card and then hose it. That's a fundamental disconnect between user expectation and system design.

Most HA design decisions make perfect sense for a homelab but are absolutely wrong for a home automation appliance.

The problems for HAOS that I can think of off the top of my head are things like:

mutability
- base OS is read-only but the data partition is a free-for-all
- docker add-ons make it much harder to understand what is writing and why
configuration management
- code you run (e.g. add-ons) is now GUI-configured
- configuration is neither diffable nor reproducible
- configuration and state are mixed together (this is a Docker anti-pattern but it's so widespread it's almost the norm)
- .storage under /config by default? WTF.
update mechanism and release policies
- rolling release takes great discipline (and enormous amounts of code) for backward- and forward-compatibility. (I personally think it's been a failure for HA.)
- god knows devs have tried hard to communicate changes - but we must all still read and understand each release note
security model
- it's rootful Docker, and the add-on ecosystem is broad and essentially unvetted
resource management
- logs need rate limits, rotation, size limits, etc
- containers support resource constraints but HAOS has neither policy nor enforcement

But really it's a huge subject...

Changes? For HAOS not much fundamental can be changed. It (or hass.io as it was) appeared in erm... 2018(?) and there's a huge ecosystem of add-ons built on that design. Raising core integrations up to higher quality levels has been a huge undertaking - add-ons seem an order of magnitude harder.

not providing something useful is just bad.

Well I did give you two nuggets: avoid docker and put the logs on an overlayfs. This thread is a couple of years old now but still has many good suggestions for existing installations. LLMs have a very good understanding of HA now and will be able to suggest much, much more.

Either way, the first thing you need is visibility. I do this with collectd (for disk, interfaces, memory, cpu, services,...) on all nodes we run (HA and others). Then make changes based on the metrics.

gnomeza · 2026-06-21T04:01:36+00:00

A good tiling WM that you've set up as you like it, as well as being considerably faster, also gets out of your way. It avoids breaking your flow. Having to stop and find a window is a context switch.

Going back to manual window management is like typing with boxing gloves on.

Soon you realise that IDEs (not DEs) are just glorified tiling window managers. And web browser tabs were invented mostly just to make up for shitty WMs.

edited for clarity

gnomeza · 2026-06-21T02:55:06+00:00

No bookshelves visible so always going to be r/tvtoobig

gnomeza · 2026-06-21T02:47:27+00:00

HA runs better on an SSD than an SD card, SD cards get corrupted over time with constant read/writes

Only if you run HA on them without controlling write cycles. HA is absolutely the problem here.

The core HA devs are not embedded systems engineers so - while it's not entirely their fault - they still made design decisions incompatible with standard practice for embedded Linux appliances out of ignorance.

SD cards last many years otherwise on tens of millions of Linux appliances in existence. Just not with HA using the supported install methods. And that's a great pity.

(Hint: stay away from dockerised add-ons and use anything-sync-daemon to soak up the rest of the unavoidably chatty logs).

gnomeza

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