Home Networking

SnapRAID mergerfs

Combining Different Sized Drives with mergerfs and SnapRAID

When building storage for your home server, there are lots of different routes you can take. You could buy a bunch of drives and build a FreeNAS server. Or maybe you want a hardware solution and RAID looks appealing? Or maybe you’ve heard really cool things about ZFS on Linux and want to try it … [Read more…]

Reverse Proxy With HTTPS Without Opening Ports

Reverse Proxy with HTTPS without Opening Ports

If you’ve got a slew of different applications running on your home network, it might be time to add a reverse proxy. What is a reverse proxy? It allows you to access your services at a nice easy to remember URL rather than an IP Address and port. For example, instead of accessing Home Assistant at http://192.168.1.2:8123 I can instead type https://homeassistant.example.com. On top of creating a reverse proxy in today’s article, we’ll also be adding HTTPS support via Let’s Encrypt. This will give us a secure connection on our LAN so that when we connect to the application we know there is no one listening while on our network. Maybe a bit overkill, but it does give you the nice green badge in your browser too.

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Raspberry Pi Video Surveillance Monitor

Raspberry Pi Video Surveillance Monitor

Have video cameras around your home and property for home defense? Have an easy way to display them? In today’s article, I’m going to walk through turning a Raspberry Pi into a video surveillance monitoring system. You can hook up the Raspberry Pi to your TV or any other monitor you have lying around to create your very own video surveillance system.

I recently bought a Ubiquiti camera and set it up to monitor my house. While I can always view the camera through the UniFi Video app or through my NVR, I wanted an easy way to open up the feed if my phone was dead or in another room. I’ve now turned one of my HDMI ports on my living room TV to an awesome video surveillance monitor that anyone can use, just using a Raspberry Pi. Using the software from today’s article you can create grids or do fullscreen streams including rotating through several different cameras.

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Adding Video Surveillance with UniFi Video

Adding Home Video Surveillance with UniFi Video

Want to add video surveillance to your home? After looking through several different camera hardware and software setups I decided to invest in the Ubiquiti Networks solution starting with their “Dome” camera and hosting the UniFi Video software on my own home server. Today’s article covers the install process for both the hardware and software. … [Read more…]

Using Two MQTT Brokers with Broker Bridging

Using Two MQTT Brokers with Broker Bridging

Running your own private MQTT broker on your local network? This is great for all your local Home Automation devices but would about things that are outside your network? Apps like OwnTracks can communicate your GPS to an MQTT broker but you’ll need to open up your network to the outside.

Today’s article details a hybrid-cloud solution using an external MQTT broker in conjunction with a private MQTT broker running on your local network. Home Assistant (or any Home Automation platform) can subscribe to topics on your local MQTT broker while still receiving messages from the external one.

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