If you are a Home Assistant enthusiast and are interested in long term storage of sensor and other data, you will be using InfluxDB. InfluxDB is a time-series database, different from SQLite and MariaDB. Over time your InfluxDB database can grow and grow...becoming unwieldy and possibly slow. Fortunately there are...
By default Home Assistant will store approximately 10 days worth of entity data that allows you to do cool charts, graphs and dashboards. This is called recorder data. Recorder data is stored in a SQL (relational) database, which by default is SQLite. However, if you want long term storage of your...
If you are using InfluxDB 1.x and want to do automated application consistent backup, this post is for you. What is InfluxDB? It's a time-series database designed to hold long term time-series data, like sensor readings from Home Assistant. It is optimized for time-series data, and is NOT a traditional...
If you are running Home Assistant OS (HAOS) as a VM on Promox, you may want to display the hardware sensor data (CPU load, CPU temp, disk utilization, etc.) of your Promox host inside Home Assistant. To do this we will install the Glances server on the Proxmox host, then...
Sometimes you have the need to build a new Home Assistant installation and restore your old configuration. Maybe your SD card died, or you want to migrate Home Assistant to a more powerful server.  In fact, you can even do cross-platform migrations (e.g. from a Raspberry Pi 4 to a Proxmox...
If you are curious about how to run Home Assistant OS (HAOS) on Proxmox (a free/open source virtualization platform), you've come to the right place. This post is a detailed guide on how to get Home Assistant OS (HAOS) as a virtual machine (VM) up and running quickly on Proxmox VE...
This blog post details my lessons learned doing a fresh Home Assistant installation in early 2023. Here, I provide guidance pulled from many sources, and my own experience using Home Assistant. I've been big into the smart home for a few years using various platforms such as SmartThings, Hubitat, Apple HomeKit,...
A couple of years ago I got the Elgato Stream Deck XL. For those of you not familiar with the Stream Deck XL, it is a "macro" controller of sorts where each button is a LCD screen that you can fully customize in terms of both image and functionality. It...
Along with a few updates to my 2023 dream home office setup (see post here), I also felt it was the time to do a whole house network upgrade. This post covers my network "refresh" that is built to support multi-gig, 10Gbps, PoE and enterprise WiFi. Nothing was broken with...
Introduction I've been working at home for over 8 years, so the pandemic didn't really change a lot for me in terms of where I work. In late 2021 and early 2022 I did a major redecoration of my home office and shared a blog post about that experience. Now...
Action needed: If you are a RSS subscriber to this blog, the URL is changing. For a long time I've used Feedblitz as a feed manager, but their utility has passed. I've started an immediate transition back to the standard Wordpress RSS URL of:https://www.derekseaman.com/feedPlease update your favorite RSS reader with...
Do you own a Synology NAS with DSM 7.0 or 7.1 and run Docker containers? Would you like those containers to use a Wireguard VPN provider for increased privacy and security? If the answer is yes, then keep reading. In order to get Wireguard working for Docker containers on your Synology...