in a nutshell

This is how the control and information exchange of smart devices work:

Phone App -> [Server] … [Server] -> Smart Device and vice versa

There’s no way around this concept.

Now, Google gives you the phone app and the (public) server part. but these only work with their servers and apps, keeping you locked in.

HA gives you the same, a server and an app, but allows you to keep the server private (access via vpn for public)

Also who guarantees that Google Home will be there in the next few years? HA will still keep running even if it ever gets abandoned.

If you haven’t, get yourself familiar with Docker and docker compose, and then use portainer to manage all your stuff. It’s a lifesaver.

couple of Pis are cheaper

Are they thou? In my region the 4Bs are selling at around 60 bucks (no case, no SD)… A “couple” of them (including some for backup and HA and Octoprint) would mean at least 4 of them, totalling at 240 bucks (or 300 with SD). For that money, one could get two (or even three) more-than-capable thin clients.

As some others mentioned, when the DNS goes down (which pihole is) your whole network is down. With the fragility (and slowness) of the PI, it’d be more likely it will go down, sooner than later.

Considering the cost, a good alternative, imho, would be some sort of thin client, with an energy efficient CPU. So, instead of getting 2-3 PIs, better get one of these TCs, while keeping your PI as a DNS backup solution.

but yeah, setting up davx5 with my fastmail account gives me exactly what I need. I can use the google calendar app to have my FM calendar fully integrated.

Wouldn’t put pihole or any other mission critical network service on a Pi, unless there’s some kind of fallback.

Yeah, I’ve heard about radicale. But the “merging” and sync still happens on the client side of things (Android). I was hoping for some kind of dockerized backend service that can bring together all the calendars. And the only thing I’d have to do is go into the backend, connect FM and google (or any other calendar) and link that (dockerized) service account on my phone.

Good point… I might add rclone as a feature later on.

Restic has a feature where you can copy snapshots from one repo to another, if that’s what you mean

Not familiar with owncloud.

But can’t you set something like “http://127.0.0.1” as domain?

Most of the docker services use mounted folders/files, which I usually store in the users home folder /home/username/Docker/servicename.

Now, my personal habit of choice is to have user folders on a separate drive and mount them into /home/username. Additionally, one can also mount /var/lib/docker this way. I also spin up all of these services with portainer. The benefit is, if the system breaks, I don’t care that much, since everything is on a separate drive. In case of needing to re-setup everything again, I just spin up portainer again which does the rest.

However, this is not a backup, which should be done separately in one way or the other. But it’s for sure safer than putting all the trust into one drive/sdcard etc.

Maybe my comment might be a bit misunderstanding, but I do run my Fedora VM within proxmox too. So, I have two VMs, Fedora and Xpenology.

I was just wondering whether the additional VM makes even sense to have it running alongside XP.

I’d really prefer to avoid NextCloud, since it was very slow, in comparison to Synology, on the same hardware.

But thx for the hint abaout casaos. Didn’t know about that. Will definitely have a look at it.

Actually… I think I like fastmail

I’ve already switched to protonmail. And tried skiff before that, which I didn’t like that much.

I might give fastmail a try. Thx

ok… valid point, and I also agree on the refactoring argument.

To mitigate the compatibility issue, they could release a new major version, and let plugin developers simultaneously (or not) rewrite their codebase to make it compatible. That’s how WordPress plugins work, although WP is a whole other mess, and not the best of examples, but they also have a large userbase and plugins.

lol, I too was thinking about trying to kickstart a similar project in Go. I’m by no means a professional go-dev (former PHP-dev, currently Node), but I think it shouldn’t be that hard.

but also, most of these languages run a compiled executable, while PHP has to go through a parser. java is another exception with it’s vm, but you get my point.

so, all in all… PHP has overhead, in many ways … sure it might be negligible (gosh, I always have to look up the spelling of this word) in some situation, but in other it adds up so much that it makes it unsuitable for the task.

yeah, I like these type of convos where there’s no right or wrong… just "yes, but…"s

And what I forgot to mention, there’s the fact that it’s not async. So it adds up even more to the delay when fetching stuff.

I mentioned it in another topic regarding kbin, which is also written in PHP.

If you run a node/go/rust server and you hit the endpoint /hello which returns a simple “hello world”, they will just return that. PHP however, has to initialize and execute the whole framework stuff, before returning a simple “hello world”.

So there’s definitely some overhead, which to some degree can be limited by using caching like redis, etc.

Yeah… NC is really bad. I like the idea of the project, but the stack they chose to write it in, PHP, is just not suitable for such tasks

I don’t know much about cryptpad. Someone just mentioned it, and I hoped it had an app as well… lol

Filebrowser looks even nicer than cryptopad, and I think folders could probably be symlinked to immich, etc.

Will definitely keep an eye on it. Thx

Edit: Oh, just saw it’s web-only :-(