I want to build a x86 small form factor computer in order to run the router and home assistant on it, and I’m looking for the best solution:
At first I though on setting up HaOS as a router and using a dhcp plugin on homeassistant, but is a very barebones setup without much advanced networking capabilities. Also I didn’t find a way to easily setup WAN.
Then I though I could set up a hypervisor and run a router OS like VyOS or openwrt and HaOS. I know proxmox, but maybe there are lighter hypervisor more capable of delivering this setup.
And finally I though that I could use openwrt and install (either natively or via docker) homeassistant on it. This currently seems like the less headachy way, but I could be totally wrong.
I can’t find much documentation on either of those methods, so I’m asking to you what would you do, and if somebody is using a similar setup, to share some insights.
Once upon a time I had a little intel j1900 box with esxi on it, running pfsense in one vm and ubuntu + docker in another.
that lasted right up until I broke it, and seperated the two out again, having a home NAS and a ubiquity UDM instead for a router.
Life was too short to juggle that setup.
Similar story here, it’s a great idea until it goes wrong, then you’ve got two appliances down instead of one.
My Home Assistant instance has become so mission critical to my household that I’ve got a dedicated Pi 4 for it, with a fallback Pi 4 and preflashed SD card ready to hot swap and restore from backup.
Yeah I think that’s pretty much a universal story: you consolidate things until it breaks, at which point it’s impossible to fix anything because absolutely everything is broken all at once.
Routing should probably be separate hardware for most people, as should DNS (if you’re running your own) and then you can probably lump most everything else on a single server or so.
