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I have a professional 'homelab' and a personal 'homelab'. You're 100% right, they can be a time sink. The important bit is to make sure the time is setup not 'm

I have a professional 'homelab' and a personal 'homelab'. You're 100% right, they can be a time sink. The important bit is to make sure the time is setup not 'maintenance' time. The trick is twofold: if it isn't 'declare and deploy' don't run it. If it isn't in your backup/restore pipeline don't run it. Pfsense and Home assistant are huge pains in the ass. Everything else is easy breezy. Proxmox/pbs/truenas/talos/linstor/DRBD are all amazing. I'm thinking about ditching pfsense for tailscale/cloudflare tunnels, but it's not worth the time atm. I don't have a viable alternative for HA.

zrail 6mo ago
Out of curiosity, what makes Home Assistant a pain?
- ryukoposting 6mo ago
  I would guess I/O. Your normal containers need network access and that's it. HA, depending on your setup, might want Bluetooth, a USB zigbee dongle, z-wave, etc etc
  - Normal_gaussian 6mo ago
    No, the I/O passthroughs are fine. Proxmox and HA are fairly great at keeping them stable. I have passthrough for WiFi/BT/USB zigbee/USB thread Of course it pins you to a singular proxmox host, not benefitting from proxmox HA, but that's the way the cookie crumbles with h/w. pfsense and home-assistant both claim to be declarative configs, which is technically true. However the config files are not well or effectively documented, and where there is documentation it typically relates to the GUI which diverges significantly in arrangement. Their configs are declarative in that they declare the way their internal processes are configured, not in the way that they should interact and appear to other services (networking people will find that statement very confusing). Both are effectively "Operating Systems" within operating systems, starting/stopping/configuring/managing other programs, home assistant is doing this to the nth degree. When you start them it is very hard to determine when they have actually started - particularly the bits you care about. Getting errors and logs out of them is painful. Updating configs and restarting has multiple routes, the longest of which is very long. Both are reasonable ways to get to grips with the problem areas they solve for; they are not optimal however.
- Normal_gaussian 6mo ago
  My other comment goes into more detail relating specifically to my earlier comment. But a niggle with Home Assistant in particular: It appears to be a system designed to be debugging adjacent, with every intent to frustrate debugging.

zrail 6mo ago

Out of curiosity, what makes Home Assistant a pain?

ryukoposting 6mo ago
I would guess I/O. Your normal containers need network access and that's it. HA, depending on your setup, might want Bluetooth, a USB zigbee dongle, z-wave, etc etc
- Normal_gaussian 6mo ago
  No, the I/O passthroughs are fine. Proxmox and HA are fairly great at keeping them stable. I have passthrough for WiFi/BT/USB zigbee/USB thread Of course it pins you to a singular proxmox host, not benefitting from proxmox HA, but that's the way the cookie crumbles with h/w. pfsense and home-assistant both claim to be declarative configs, which is technically true. However the config files are not well or effectively documented, and where there is documentation it typically relates to the GUI which diverges significantly in arrangement. Their configs are declarative in that they declare the way their internal processes are configured, not in the way that they should interact and appear to other services (networking people will find that statement very confusing). Both are effectively "Operating Systems" within operating systems, starting/stopping/configuring/managing other programs, home assistant is doing this to the nth degree. When you start them it is very hard to determine when they have actually started - particularly the bits you care about. Getting errors and logs out of them is painful. Updating configs and restarting has multiple routes, the longest of which is very long. Both are reasonable ways to get to grips with the problem areas they solve for; they are not optimal however.
Normal_gaussian 6mo ago
My other comment goes into more detail relating specifically to my earlier comment. But a niggle with Home Assistant in particular: It appears to be a system designed to be debugging adjacent, with every intent to frustrate debugging.