It began when someone mentioned that the LED strip that lights up my stairs had stopped working. My first instinct was to replace the batteries in the motion sensors near the stairs. Still nothing. After some troubleshooting, head scratching and a second round of fresh batteries, it turned out the problem wasn’t the sensors. It was the hub.
I had a half-built Home Assistant living inside CasaOS. Both had been sitting in the rack so long that I couldn’t remember the logins, and I had no documentation on how I’d built either one. On top of that, I had a hodgepodge of IoT hubs and devices I could no longer keep track of. I’d already decided to migrate my ESXi VM to Proxmox, so I figured I might as well redo all of it.
I’d love to tell you Home Assistant is up and running, but it isn’t (yet). Here’s what I have so far:
- Three Lenovo Tiny PCs running Proxmox. CasaOS is gone.
- Libation migrated from ESXi to Proxmox
- Audiobookshelf running on Proxmox
- Proxmox Datacenter Manager managing the nodes
- Nginx Proxy Manager
- A Cloudflare Tunnel (cloudflared) so I can reach Audiobookshelf away from home without opening any ports on the router
- A Homepage dashboard
- A honeypot that pushes alerts to Pushover
- A Proxmox Backup Server, with nightly backups of every VM and container and a restore test that passed
Everything has been stable for about two weeks, and learning Proxmox has been a lot of fun.
What’s next?
There’s still cleanup to do. One of the Tiny PCs has a bad NVMe drive. It’s under warranty and I’ve filed for an advance replacement, so the new drive ships before I send the old one back. The first step was moving everything off it.
After that:
- Ansible playbooks to update the nodes, VMs and LXCs.
- Home Assistant, and hopefully retiring all those IoT hubs.
- A fourth node for Jellyfin.
The irony is that the stair lights still aren't fixed. Home Assistant is next and I'll be sure to write about it when the lights come back on. In the meantime, I have a lab that I can actually document, back up and rebuild.