As you can connect to the internet you can also access your router (or at least a router). And when running ping, even if you had overlapping IP addresses you should still get responses from the network.

So, two things come to mind: Either your laptop is running with a different netmask than other devices which causes problems or you’re connected to something else than the local network you think you are. Changes on DHCP server or misconfigured network settings on the laptop might cause the first issue. The second might be because you’re connected to your phone AP, some guest network on your devices or neighbors wifi by accident (multiple networks with same SSID around or something like that).

Other might be problems with mesh-networking (problem with ARP tables or something) which could cause issues like that. That scenario should get fixed by reconnecting to the network, but I’ve seen bugs in firmware which causes errors like this. Have you tried to restart the mesh-devices?

Is it possible that your laptop has enabled very restrictive firewall rules for whatever reason? Check that.

And then there’s of course the long route. Start by verifying that you actually have IP address you assume you have (address itself, subnet, gateway address). Then verify that you can connect to your router (open management portal, ping, ssh, all the things). Assuming you can, then check the router interface and verify that your laptop is shown there as a dhcp-client/connected device (or whatever term that software uses). Then start to ping other devices on your network and also ping your laptop from those devices and also verify that they have addresses you assume (netmask/gateway included).

And so on, one piece at the time. Check only single thing at one time, so you get full picture on what’s working and what’s not. And from there you can eventually isolate the problem and fix it.

It’ll always ask for the default configuration after hard reset. So, no, you won’t lose it forever.

That’s better, but you still need to have single wire to loop it around, which is not normally accessible. And at least in here the term ‘multimeter’ spesifically means one without a clamp, so you’d need to wire the multimeter in series with the load and that can be very dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Also, cheap ones often are not properly insulated nor rated for wall power (regardless of your voltage), so, again, if you don’t know what you are doing DO NOT measure current from a wall outlet with a multimeter.

or multimeter

Unless you really know what you’re doing DO NOT measure current on a wall outlet with a multimeter. Specially not with a cheap one. That can pretty easily break your hardware, burn your house down and kill you, not necessarily in that order.

“Enough battery life” is a bit wide requirement. What you’re running from that?

Most of the ‘big brands’ (eaton, apc…) work just fine with linux/open source, but specially low end consumer models even from big players might not and not all of them have any kind of port for data transfer at all.

Personally I’d say that if you’re looking for something smaller than 1000VA just get a brand new one. Bigger than those might be worth to buy used and just replace batteries, but that varies a lot. I’ve got few dirt cheap units around which apprently fried their charging circuit when the original battery died, so they’re e-waste now and on the other hand I have 1500VA cheap(ish) FSP which is running on 3rd or 4th set of batteries, so there’s not a definitive answer on what to get.

My Z-wave switches and smart plugs are reasonably accurate for a common house use, but I wouldn’t say that they are ‘very accurate’. I haven’t done any measurements, but if in example I plug in an appliance which has 200W on label I get roughly that number from the system. But obviously I don’t have any way to tell if the smart plug shows wrong value or if the label on the device is incorrect. And with things like LED bulbs the current varies anyways with temperature plus I don’t know if the things take actual line voltage into account which varies a bit as well.

For my use case they’re accurate enough, but if you need ‘electroncis lab accurate’ results I doubt that any of the smart plugs can provide that.

I’m assuming that ‘cylinder’ is a live explosive. I think they don’t want to accidentally puncture the shell.

Overall, how long do you think you could cope without your HA platform before it becomes an issue?

It will never become an issue. As I mentioned, all the smart things I have can still be controlled manually. Sure, things like timing energy consumption to cheaper hours and turning on outside lights when it gets dark either stop working or needs to be manually controlled, but it would be more an annoyance than a issue.

And when planning for expansions I’m pretty strict that things stay that way. Everything has to work without HA, internet connectivity or anything at all besides obviously having electricity. Automations are just icing on the cake and they can save a few bucks here and there and offer quality of life functionality, but I’d never rely on those alone. Manual override has to be always an option.

I don’t really have an recovery strategy in place, but what I do have is that all the smart stuff in my home can be controlled manually too. Light switches work just like dumb ones, thermostats have manual buttons and so on. So even if the server goes down I can still control everything manually. Obviously automations won’t work, but the house isn’t crippled if that single raspberry decides to go belly up.

There’s a ton of things I left out as they’re not really relevant for the discussion. Back when phone line modems were the only option for me to connect to the internet even dialing to different area code in my country took away a ton of bandwidth and it was more expensive. As you know, that 50kbps is pretty much the best case scenario and even on that case it’s practically useless on todays internet/www.

In rural Belarus with soviet era cabling you’d be lucky to get even a half of that so on the modern web, with image downloads and javascript disabled, it’d still take several minutes to get a single news article to your screen. Our government owned news outlet still offers a web based rendering of teletext-service (and the real thing too) from the 70’s and it’s pretty much just pure text with very little overhead included and even with that you can only get about 10 words per second with 50kbps line.

And in reality, where things have overhead and theoretical maximum is very rarely reached, it’s more than likely that you can read faster than you can move information over a dial-up line.

Modern web won’t work too well over dial-up, bandwidth requirements have gone way up. Even with pretty good lines you’ll only get around 50kbps and loading the front page on my lemmy instance pulls almost 10MB of data. So that alone would take over 20 minutes. Our local news site pulls over 25MB and I assume any commercial site with ads would take even more.

Obvously you can still run things like usenet, which helps with bandwidth requirements, have local wifi-mesh with proxies and so on, but a single telephone line is still practically nothing. Even 100 dial-up lines with perfectly managed proxies could only support a handful of users of any kind, even when restricting access heavily.

Wide mesh wifi networks with 4G/5G uplinks from neighboring countries would be far more useful. Starlink even more so, but that’s a whole another beast to manage for various reasons. And then there’s things like microwave links which can give you even gigabits of bandwidth across 10-20km.

It’s a 4 hour old troll account, no need to feed them.

Apparently it is just from yesterday.

There’s all kinds of commercial military drones around and they’re obviously far more refined and thought out than this one, but it’s equally crazy/impressive that with todays tehcnology pretty much any individual can just buy a drone and strap an actual rifle to it. Sure, it’s not accurate by any stretch, but if you have few thousand dollars laying around (and a access to firearms) you could to this too.

That would obviously be a Really Bad Idea™ for multiple reasons, but from a purely technical view it’s fairly simple.

Oh, I forgot to mention, I’m going to run the whole thing on a VPS, so I’ll have access to proper reverse dns and all, so that’s not an issue.

The couple of domains have been running on my company so the userbase is already there, but as I’m shutting down the business side they need to move to something else. And I don’t really care if users want to switch to something else, that’s not my problem.

“Debris caused a small fire at MILITARY FACILITY” versus “Russia attacks to CIVIL RESIDENTIAL BUILDING killing 12”. Who cares where the weapons Ukraine uses to defend their cities were made originally. If Russia doesn’t like that their military is under attack there’s a very easy solution to stop that.

I have no idea about cozy.io, but just to offer another option, I’ve been running Seafile for years and it’s pretty solid piece of hardware. And while it does have other stuff than just file storage/sharing, it’s mostly about just files and nothing else. Android client isn’t the best one around, but gets the job done (background tasks at least on mine tend to freeze now and then), on desktop it just works.

It depends. I’ve ran small websites and other services on a old laptop at home. It can be done. But you need to realize the risks that come with it. If the thing I’m running for fun goes down. someone might be slightly annoyed that the thing isn’t accessible all the time, but it doesn’t harm anyones business. And if someones livelihood is depending on the thing then the stakes are a lot higher and you need to take suitable precautions.

You could of course offload the whole hardware side to amazon/hetzner/microsoft/whoever and run your services on leased hardware which simplifies things a lot, but you still run into a problem where you need to meet more or less arbitary specs for an email server so that Microsoft or Google even accept what you’re sending, you need to have monitoring and staff available to keep things running all the time, plan for backups and other disaster recovery and so on. So it’s “a bit” more than just ‘apt install dovecot postfix apache2’ on a Debian box.

Others have already mentioned about the challenges on the software/management side, but you also need to take into consideration hardware failures, power outages, network outages, acceptable downtime and so on. So, even if you could technically shoehorn all of that into a raspberry pi and run it on a windowsill, and I suppose it would run pretty well, you’ll risk losing all of the data if someone spills some coffee on the thing.

So, if you really insist doing this on your own hardware and maintenance (and want to do it properly), you’d be looking (at least):

• 2 servers for reundancy, preferably 3rd one laying around for a quick swap
• Pretty decent UPS setup, again multiple units for reundancy
• Routers, network hardware, internet uplinks and everything at least duplicated and configured correctly to keep things running
• A separate backup solution, on at least two different physical locations, so a few more servers and their network, power and other stuff taken care of
• Monitoring, alerting system in case of failures, someone being on-call for 24/7

And likely a ton of other stuff I can’t think of right now. So, 10k for hardware, two physical locations and maintenance personnel available all the time. Or you can buy a website hosting (VPS even if you like) for few bucks a month and email service for a 10/month (give or take) and have the services running, backed up and taken care of for far longer than your own hardware lifetime is for a lot cheaper than that hardware alone.