Thanks for the info. That’s odd since most Z-wave devices can enter pairing mode with a button press.

How do you like the lock? Any issues with it?

I’ve actually been eyeing the Yale Assure Lock 2 because I want a keyless option (it’s Z-wave as well). Does anybody here have experience with that one?

Yeah there’s a bunch of them out there. I’ve had one running for a while now. Don’t have the specific model but it’s something like this: https://a.co/d/2v5M3U3

This is what I do though technically it’s a container on Proxmox. Otherwise I’d recommend one of the LibreComputer boards. The Le Potato one is solid and cheap though also over kill for just a PiHole.

I just have a home assistant dashboard running as a full screen webpage. I don’t have auto wake on movement but it works great otherwise.

If you’re up for switching to Home Assistant then you could change to Zigbee or Z-wave devices. Most are made in China but since they don’t connect to the internet you don’t have the same backdoor issues that devices like Tuya do. I’ve been shifting all my WiFi devices to local protocols and it’s great.

A “free” option if you have some PC hardware lying around is to run OPNsense/pfSense instead of buying a dedicated box. I say “free” since it will use more power and require more time to configure and manage.

Alternnatively, I ran one of TP-Links AX consumer router/AP combos for several years and it was solid. Even had an OpenVPN server built in. I can look up the exact model if you’re interested.

Haha I’ll confess I didn’t actually read the blog post. I just read the synopsis and made an assumption about it :b

I love all the local firmware swaps people are doing these days. I’m waiting on the day I can swap all my Google Homes to be Home Assistant powered. It’ll probably (almost certainly) require a hardware swap to an ESP32 but I’ll do it anyway as long as it’s pretty straightforward.

I really like my UDM Pro, but you can also run OPNsense on off the shelf hardware.

Yeah I was worried that might be the only way to do it. It’d be great to have it natively supported in the add-on eventually. Let me know if you have any luck with it!

Pihole is a big recommendation for me! It really changes the way you interact with the web. Home Assistant as well. If you’re at all interested in home automation it’s fantastic.

If you’ve got an interest in privacy I’d recommend playing around with hosting SearXNG. And a new service I’m playing with is Immich. Think Google Photos but locally hosted, free, and open source.

A really interesting alternative to the “profit at the expense of all else” model is a worker coop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative

I really hope these make a resurgence.

For reducing power consumption (and thus heat), a simple improvement could be just switching to a headless Linux install instead of Windows. It’ll run much more efficiently for homelab workloads.

Since you already have a UDM, I’d suggest just a simple port forward to expose your Minecraft server to the public internet. Yes, it will expose you to risk of attack by having anything public from your network, but as long as you keep your Minecraft server up to date you should stay covered security-wise pretty well. I’d suggest setting up a cronjob to restart the Minecraft server and check for updates every 24hr to make sure you’re always up to date.