In theory Canonical could lock down Ubuntu like that, but it would be the end of Ubuntu. Switching over to Mint or Debian is not a big deal for majority of the linux-users and also Ubuntu would lose all the advantages they can currently pull off from Debian package maintainers. Also I suppose it would bring a ton of headaches with licenses, but IANAL, so don’t quote me on that. And, obviously, that would kill snapcraft too as I don’t see any incentives for developers to support walled gardens for free, so it wouldn’t be all bad.

Philip Morris: 1 pack of cigarettes per day is not addiction.

Yeah, it’s not really a problem when I’m at home, but there are times when I’m not physically nearby the hardware and on those cases it’d be nice to have option to migrate HA to different hardware on the fly.

Also having z-wave controller on ethernet would make it a bit easier to position antenna in the middle of everything, my server isn’t the centerpiece of our living room after all.

Sort of high availability. I don’t really have the hardware right now for proper high availability setup, but I have a spare laptop running proxmox which I use for pihole and other ‘network critical’ stuff when doing maintenance for the main server. I don’t have any doubts about passtrough working, I’d just like to have flexibility on the environment and thus it’d be nice to have z-wave controller on ethernet.

But I think I’ll end up with ZWA-2, I’ll just use usb hub or something to make it physically easier to move HAOS VM between different hardware.

I assume it’s the usual suspects, as in aliexpress and ebay for the components. Or quality ones from mouser/something. I’m just not in the market for yet another DIY project right now, there’s plenty of unfinished ones around, like adding sensors and IR transmitter to garage for heat pump control and temperature monitoring with esp32.

Well that’s exactly what I asked for. Pretty neat thing at least on quick read up. Unfortunately the customs situation with shipments from USA to Finland (or EU in general) is a mess right now, so I wont dig up my visa card at least immediately. I need to study a bit what’s actually the situation today (and hope that it doesn’t change again after few days).

There is, but as with all hardware, it’s one thing to have something supported and another thing if it actually works in real life scenario. My current razberry7 is on supported devices list but constant jamming of the controller says that even if it’s technically supported it doesn’t really work in practise.

I’m not running LXC, so USB passtrough should not be a problem. Running zwave-js on haos requires that the hardware is visible to the OS and as razberry7 connects to raspberry pi gpio ports I’d need to move the whole installation over to rasberry which I don’t want. I’ve already burned myself with broken SD-card with that setup and even then the controller didn’t work as reliable as I’d want to.

I saw that project and it seems to be pretty promising, but as it’s on pretty experimental state I think I’ll skip that for now. The biggest headache I’ve had with home automation so far is unstable z-wave connectivity, so I’m not really interested on tinkering with experimental stuff.

But good to hear that ZWA-2 actually works as well as advertising claims.

Team expects, may be useful, could be used, prototype, are currently investigating and so on. Cool piece of technolgy, but no even mention when they’d expect that to be commercially available, if it’s even possible to manufacture in commercial scale. Like many other new battery chemistries and technologies, it shows promise and makes a good headline, but at this point that’s pretty much it.

Armbian works on most, if not all, raspberry pi compatible boards. I meant that support from vendor is often a lot shorter than from raspberry and it can cause problems/bugs with bootloaders and drivers unless vendor is actively working with armbian/kernel development for their chipset.

Orangepi and other “clones” often use rockchip on their boards which isn’t as well supported as Raspberry equivalent so it’s not direct replacement. Also their supported lifespan is often much less than rpi.

It is, but the sad reality is that while you contribute your capacity for good cause it’ll be abused by bad actors as well. Obviously with snowflake node you don’t get to see what’s excactly going trough, but some time ago I had exit node running and I got several calls from my ISP that there’s malicious traffic coming from my IP address. ISP managed it pretty well when I explained what’s going on but eventually they got so many complaints from other peers on the network that they took ‘hard route’ and told that they’ll take my connection down unless I shut down the node. No hard feelings for the ISP, they took all the abuse mails and other annoyance for me and I absolutely understand their decision. But it’s good to at least acknowledge that tor isn’t just to get around oppressive policies.

I wouldn’t compare Swartz with the AI scrapers. Aaron pulled mostly public domain documents from JSTOR and caused minor issues with the servers which is “a bit” different than pulling everything from the internet to a database over a practically global DDOS-attack. But when companies do it it’s apparently somehow different and Swartz was pretty much publicly lynched and eventually bullied to suicide.

It’s a government thing. I’m not sure when they’ve started to consider alternatives, but that renewal process (as old systems are on EOL) has most likely been on the table for years.

That’s my use case. But my frigate-box is strictly behind firewall and I access it over wireguard when I’m away.

Get a REALLY good on-site support deal for your hardware. You also may need to adjust TTL values on your network stack.

You’re not worrying for nothing. Losing wall power will shut down the drives and as usb-cradle is generally slower than “proper” drive bus it’s more likely that some write operation is going on when power is lost and that’ll potentially cause data corruption. Obviously not every power outage will cause issues, but I’d say it’s a higher risk with USB-drives than with drives on a SATA/m.2 bus.

But no matter what your setup is, raid is not a backup. All kinds of things can happen which cause loss of data and you should plan accordingly. If all you have is two drives on usb-cradles I might choose to use one of them as a offline backup disk and one for ‘live’ data so that it’s more likely that at least one of the drives is functional even after power issues or whatever, but that approach has it’s own problems too.

I had a two (or maybe a bit less) bitcoins on my wallet back in the day. I sold them for ~20€.

Well, the touchscreen part and maybe a bit more, had the same reaction on many directors at Nokia at the time. I don’t know if they feel like an idiot, but at least you’re not alone.