Infrastructure | Danny Tsang

Jul/22

Home Assistant Continuous Integration Workflow

Filed Under Home Automation, Houseware, Infrastructure, Software at 4th July 2022 0:01 by Danny

Tags: ci, continuous integration, development, home assistant, home automation, smart home, software version control, source code, travisci, yaml

Overview Development pipelines such as version control to deploying changes automatically. In Home Assistant’s case, you can make changes in YAML text files anywhere and Home Assistant can pick up the changes and automatically load them. Tools I use GitHub … Continue reading →

Feb/22

Home Assistant Backup

Filed Under Home Automation, Infrastructure at 7th February 2022 0:01 by Danny

Tags: backup, home assistant, snapshot

Overview Backups are very important especially the amount of effort spent in automating everything. If the automations are done right, any loss would have a impact whether it’s inconvenience to dependencies making the time to recover even more important. I … Continue reading →

Oct/21

Home Assistant: New Starter Tips

Filed Under Home Automation, Infrastructure, IOT at 4th October 2021 0:01 by Danny

Tags: automation, hass.io, hassio, home, home automation, homeassistant, iot, open source.foss

Overview These are the things I wish I knew at the start of Home Assistant to save time and re-doing various setup related changes. It purely focuses on configurable points within Home Assistant as opposed to choices of eco systems, … Continue reading →

Sep/21

Restructuring Instances With DigitalOcean

Filed Under Infrastructure, Linux at 6th September 2021 0:01 by Danny

Tags: backup, clouid, containers, Digital Ocean, Docker, docker-compose, high availability, load balacers, load balancing, VPS

Overview I have been using DigitalOcean for hosting my blog as well as other services for a while now. Not only have there been significant advances with the likes of volumes, firewalls, etc for free the value for money on … Continue reading →

Mar/21

Home Assistant Introduction

Filed Under Container, Home Automation, Houseware, Infrastructure, Linux at 1st March 2021 0:01 by Danny

Overview I have been using Home Assistant for 6 months and it has been an amazing investment of time and energy. Home Assistant is like the controller or brains behind any home automation. As a community project, it has it’s … Continue reading →

Aug/20

Install Network UPS Monitoring Server

Filed Under Infrastructure at 3rd August 2020 0:01 by Danny

Tags: debian networking ups tool, hassio, home assistant, raspberry pi, Ubuntu, uninterruptable power supply, ups

Overview I have been using an Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS) on and off for years. It was in the last few years when we noticed the lights brightening and dimming on halogen bulbs I decided to look into it deeper … Continue reading →

Dec/19

Pi-hole DNS Filtering

Filed Under Container, Infrastructure, Linux at 2nd December 2019 0:01 by Danny

Tags: DNS, dnssec, Network, Networking, pihole, Security

Overview Pi-hole is a very light weight, DNS filtering server. It’s so light that there are reports it can even run on a Raspberry Pi 1! Example reasons for filtering DNS include blocking ads to filtering out harmful sites (content … Continue reading →

Jun/19

Backup Overview

Filed Under Infrastructure at 3rd June 2019 0:01 by Danny

Tags: backup, local, malware, offsite, online, Security, virus

Overview This post ties all the backup posts into 1 overview of the backups. There are 3 main types based on the location of where the data is stored / managed: Local Offsite Online Local Backup Data that resides in … Continue reading →