HAOS restores order
Disclaimer: Some moments from what was written may turn out to be wild bayan-babayans… But I’m somehow indifferent. And there will be a lot of water.
In general… for many, of course, in 2024, “these Internets of yours” will give them enough opportunity to send for Easter wild picks colored eggs in one-eyed glasses, and even if all their electronics “go straight to heaven” from an unextinguished cigarette, they will simply buy a new phone in installments and, no matter what platform, swipe the next stories about how fashionable it is to swipe the next hamsters… They may not continue read. But there are freaks, digital maniacs and other outcasts of the usual society who always complicate their lives, pester others with questions of “how to do it” and love that their data and honestly purchased devices belong to them. Especially their notes, family photos and videos, a media library that was created with back-breaking labor from BBSes and flops, installations, backups, backups of backups and so on – this is graphomaniacal digital happiness, described by the terrible term “digital asset”. And they want to consume all this digital asset with maximum comfort, from their favorite hardware, without lags, advertising and dancing with a tambourine. It was for these cool cats that on Friday evening I wanted to gather my thoughts into a bunch.
If you have a sufficient amount of heterogeneous belongings, then you also need a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system – a system for storing, organizing, searching, sorting, retrieving and sharing digital assets such as images, videos, documents and other media files. This implies the use of some unknown specialized software and the term DAM even smells like an expensive, bloody prototype, but if you think about it, all sorts of TrueNAS, OpenMediaVault, Synology come to mind… someone even touched them. Some even took root. It seems that they have been around for a long time, they live, somehow they even work, but they solve minimally some tasks from the category of “network drive with some manual backups”, “torrent” and “sometimes launch a couple of pet projects”, for which it is quite The power of some router with OpenWrt or Keenetic would be enough.
But what if technology has long been possible IzGiP collect from matches and acorns mya more suitable system to manage their digital assets? And let it be manage all your digital assetsfrom controlling the kettle to downloading new episodes of “Love, Death, Robots” immediately on the ball in which you watch TV and turning on this stuff on a schedule for your arrival to play?
HAOS will save us, or rather Home Assistant OS – this is a Linux-based distribution from the creators of the Home Assistant smart home, which has long outgrown “just controlling light bulbs” and allows you to turn a mini-PC on a mezzanine into something more than just independentthe most autonomous available your own smart home server, but also provides Add-on store – a platform for deploying dockerized applications that you, your hardware, and your home need. Unfortunately, the Add-on store does not attach to the already dockerized Home Assistant Container (a minimal build that can even be run on a decent router if the mezzanine with servers has not yet grown). If you really want, you can screw some things on the side and to the dockerized Home Assistant (esphome, zigbee and bluetooth, MQTT…), but this is an unnecessary complication and an excessive crutch. A full-fledged HAOS on a separate piece of hardware looks like the best option for a full-fledged smart home server.
Not complete list what can be deployed
all sorts of Seafile, NextCloud, Resilio Sync for synchronizing files between devices and convenient sharing
media servers such as Jellyfin and Plex
all sorts of clever downloads like FlexGet, Radarr (and its analogues sonarr, readarr, plowlarr) that can look at the feeds you need and download as new episodes come out, anything to watch/read later, without banners, blocking, slowdowns and other stuff, on a convenient you player
Photoprism, Immich, Piwigo for managing photos, backing up photos from phones and publishing
Vaultwarden – password synchronization. Although KeePassXC is enough for me)
AdGuard Home – your own AdGuard instance, in which you can cut banners, fake sites and anything else that you want to stop being distracted by in the middle of the working day
Studio Code Server – your favorite VSCode accessible from any TV, refrigerator or wherever else you found a browser
JupyterLAB
Uptime Kuma – server monitoring
all sorts of things for access from the world to the home network that we can no longer talk about
all sorts of personal chats and mini-blogs
centralized news feeds and readers of usenets, books, comics…
and a whole bunch of other interesting things, starting with BirdNET and ending with some applications that you can make yourself and add to your own add-on repository (yes, you can have your own add-on repository, not nailed down to the smarthome manufacturer!), which are isolated from each other from each other, from the main system and with sufficient server capacity, they practically do not interfere with each other.
And with one clever trick, everything is collected in one place (no need to directly scroll between the tabs of clouds, services and disks, each time double-checking where something has changed or been added). Everything is available all the time, at the highest possible speed (compared to the clouds, which either fall off, then slow down, or want money, then stop registering mulberries), no one outside is rummaging around there, they are not looking for incriminating evidence on you, they are not advertising against you, banners and flashy pop-ups for every sneeze do not give you. And if I also connect the UPS, then this music will be eternal (if I replace the batteries)…
You no longer have a file dump in one corner, a Trojanized “speaker” that turns into a pumpkin when you have problems with the Internet in another, and a bag of unconnected pieces of hardware constantly beeping and ruining everything, but a full-fledged foundation of a smart home through which you can control all electronics, and all media content. You can customize everything very flexibly for yourself or replace individual parts with a more suitable solution for you personally. And all this is extremely easy to backup, incl. through some duplicati.
With significant volumes of data, the cost of hardware and disks will quickly overcome themselves.
If you are still looking, I hope HAOS will help you clear up your electronic chaos, automate some home routine and help you get a little more comfortable in this hectic world. Well, or in a carefully built bunker with a generator behind the dacha…
