AtariDump@lemmy.world wrote:

Great; how do I get my Mother to do that over the phone?

That’s not going to scale as I share out my server.

Are you incapable of recognizing that in this context my comment was a joke? What the fuck is wrong with you?

That’s not going to scale…

How many mothers do you have?

It’s not a cake walk, but I’ve something similar for a friend who can barely turn on his PC.

The OpenWRT router was fully configured before shipping it to him and the existing router’s needed Wireguard port was opened by me using the Comcast Android app. All he had to do was connect his TV to a new wifi network. That wasn’t easy, but he ultimately succeeded.

3 - An OpenWRT router with Wireguard connecting to another router 1000 miles away will do the trick.

When I bought this laptop the cheap thin clients came with eMMC storage. Keyboard and display are convenient for installations, backups and occasionally other uses. A decent size UPS is more than $100, uses power even when it’s in standby and still doesn’t last anywhere near the 7+ hours of the laptop battery when the power fails. I’m away for 3-4 weeks at a time and have had repeated power failures completely corrupt my server SSD during that time. Not everyone can fix a server problem within a few hours.

The laptop cost significantly less than a thin client, plus a gpu, plus a UPS and came with that nice keyboard and display, and a warranty. It only uses about 6-8 watts the majority of the time, important to me for a device that’s always on.

Different people have different use cases than you do. Some of us even know what works best for us.

Different people have different use cases. A thin client doesn’t work for video object recognition, nor does it come with a keyboard, display, SSD or battery backup.

I’m aware it can still be run, but as I stated in my previous comment my platform and installation were specifically purchased and configured to be fully supported and I would like to keep it that way.

This is really disappointing. My HA Supervised install was running fine last year on an old laptop and unsupported distro. In order to move to a supported installation of HA I purchased a very efficient fanless laptop specifically sized to run Debian 12 and HA Supervised. This install has been rock solid and the opposite of “Hacky” (despite Howtogeek’s clickbait title), and I expected it to easily last 5+ years. It’s been 8 months.

Of course Home Assistant developers need to sometimes EOL specific configurations and dropping 32bit hardware support was overdue (the last 32 bit Raspberry Pi was released over 10 years ago), but 6 months is an absurdly short amount of notice to give users of supported configurations on supported hardware that they’re going to be forced to migrate to something else.

A lack of empathy is a conservative hallmark.

Elon Musk , “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,”

The bulb resets are known to TP-Link and they created a firmware version that fixed it. The company didn’t release the update and now TP-Link support reps deny that the new firmware exists, so obviously the communication failures and resets are design intent.

https://community.tp-link.com/en/home/forum/topic/666612 - post #7

Just bought some Third Reality bulbs to replace TP-Link wifi bulbs a couple of weeks ago. (The TP-Link bulbs require continual communication with TP-Link’s Chinese servers or they reset every few seconds.)

Zigbee2MQTT detects the Third Reality bulbs immediately and they have been working perfectly. The same goes for TR power monitoring smart plugs.

That seems like you’re just replicating what the AC’s thermostat is doing.

In my experience the thermostats of window units are crappy at regulating room temperature. Even so, did you miss this part of the post?:

Even if the compressor is not running the fan runs 24/7 until it is physically switched off.

The OP is planning on letting the unit run for 10 minutes and then turn it off, a much less effective solution than setting up a remote temperature sensor and power monitoring switch, and much better than having to control room temperature by adjusting knob that’s “labeled from 1 to 8 with 1 being warm and 8 being coldest.”

If I had that setup, I’d use a power monitoring plug with a room temperature sensor. The combination of power monitoring and a temperature sensor would provide an amazing amount of flexibility.

For instance you can monitor when the compressor shuts off (because the current draw will drop significantly) and use the plug to shut off the entire unit, then power it on when the room temperature rises to a set point. I’d change that temperature setting depending on the time of day and possibly add a occupancy sensor or use light switches to enable and disable the AC when someone’s there. It would take some tweaking to get it working properly, but you should be able to make your room more comfortable and save energy with this kind of setup.

My HA Supervised running under Debian 12 on a mini laptop with an N200 processor takes about 3% CPU. With the Frigate NVR add-on running 2 security cameras it uses about 10%.

Power loss protection on SSDs is an interesting addition I hadn’t come across before.

We live in a very windy area and power blinks are common. A high endurance MicroSD was in use the first time the Pi wouldn’t boot, but I was in town and it was just annoying. It was a big issue when the Pi wouldn’t boot from the SSD while I was out of the country.

We don’t have high bandwidth demands so any decent OpenWRT router works fine and supports both Adguard Home and Wireguard. What I really like about putting WG in particular on the router is that if the router is up, WG is working, and the routers come back up without fail after every power outage. A 2nd Wireguard instance still runs on my Pi but since switching to WG on the router a year ago there hasn’t been a reason to even connect to it.

My problems with the Pi had me looking for other solutions and I ended up with a mini Dell laptop running Debian. (Can’t easily run WG on it due to some software conflicts.) It alleviates the need for a UPS and runs for 6+ hours if the power goes out, rather the minutes provided by my small UPS.

One of these days I’ll find a bogus reason to talk myself into upgrading the router with more powerful hardware. Mikrotik looks like a great option and I’ll take a look at RouterOS. Thanks for the info.

Besides adding a UPS, how do you deal with power failures? Are you somewhere where they’re not much of a problem?

In my experience mini computers don’t handle power failures nearly as well as purpose-built hardware.

After several power failures the SSD on my Raspberry Pi became so corrupted it wouldn’t boot, and I was 250 miles away at the time and lost access to my home network for weeks. Overlay file systems work but are a PITA to maintain. By contrast my routers have never had a problem even with repeated power failures, so instead of relying on the Pi I’ve moved my DNS and Wireguard servers to my router.

I’ve been using DuckDNS on a multiple platforms for a couple of years and it works great. Never had a problem.

My ISP changes my IP address occasionally and, as someone else mentioned, DDNS is a solution to the problem you’re having. DuckDNS doesn’t cost anything (but donations are welcome), works well, and there are detailed guides online for setting it up.

Chlamydia

Billionaire Disaster Capitalism - billionaires create their own disasters and then profit immensely off of them