If I had it to do over, I would put 2 Ethernet drops on every wall of living space but the bathrooms. And pull strings in every drop. (Conduit to hard ones) You will want a “computer room” for the network stuff, but also NAS, DVR, smart home hub, and more as the needs grow. Dedicated circuit an a place to mound a business class rack mount UPS. (2200 or better) And speaking of power, you should add more than you need. And leave room for monitoring it in the box. If your panel is in the garage, a shelf for another switch may be handy. I have a switch in my house, my detached garage, and my shed…

A retrofit is the cheap way to do it. A smart blind is not cheap…

And me. I am actively looking, but the price is nuts. Especially if you have blinds wider than Ikea supports.

Matter, Zigbee and Zwave are all local control. And on Home Assistant, you can have a dongle for all three. That will open your options quite a bit.

You do know this is selfhosted, right? People tell us that what we do is “not a good idea” all the time.

Depends on your tolerance for tinkering. If you love to tinker, Homesassistant is by far the most versatile. And can be totally local. On the other hand, if you do not want to tinker, Apple Homekit can also be (Mostly) local, and is much easier to set up. Google is not something I would trust. They have a history of shady behavior. Amazon less so, but when the internet is down, so is your house!

This… It is ease vs control. If you have needs inside the box Proxmox has planned for, it is very easy. But if you want to step outside that box, you are in for a world of surprise. I install Proxmox for clients that do not have solid Linux chops. I run KVM/libvirt on my own stuff. And if you need a web front end, oVirt exists…

I used to be all white box, and now I am all business class cast offs… If I lose a motherboard I can get one on ebay or a complete system for next to nothing if it is common like Dell. And now I just treat the boxes like cattle rather than pets. One dies and I move the hard drive to a new one.

This is incorrect and bad advice. A Dell or Lenovo business class motherboard will not bolt into an ATX case, nor connect to an ATX power supply.

I wouldn’t recommend it to my friends, maybe techie friends, but it is so hard to configure.

I hear ya, but some of the new stuff is worse! It will get better, but then there is the next hurdle; stability. Zoneminder can run for months with no baby sitting… Other stuff, not so much. But I keep watching, and hoping!

I am running Zoneminder. I have played with Frigate and it is not really production ready. And Zoneminder, while not fancy, works every time and has some of the best still pictures of anything out there. I will keep looking at the next new thing, but I am not shutting off Zoneminder until something is solidly batter.

Thanks. I want a fallback for problematic mail servers (Microsoft) only, and do not want to pay the tool to the people causing the problem. :)

I think the problem with Clear OS is that it has a very narrow market. People comfortable with Linux and containers have their own preferred method. And band new users don’t know it exists.

As for your OPNsense issue, I have never seen anything like that before and can not understand it. Hardware conflict perhaps? You can also try OpenWRT or there is a free Sophos firewall. Also Firewalla, but it is a bit old…

I was looking at their policies, and I am worried about the “Forbidden Services” where they forbid “Forward-only service for massive numbers of domains on one account.” I have 5 domains… Any idea what “massive numbers” means?

Also, can you send to an sms gateway a single email?

With these tools and others, that game is just about over. So many consumers are just done with all the BS, and I think a larger shift is coming.

I know. That is why I said there was a lot of good stuff there.

Zoho has been solid for me as well.

There is a lot of good stuff on noted.lol

The problem with selfhosting email, is that unlike other self hosted things, it lives in a distributed system. It has to talk with other mail servers and they have to talk back. The second part is hard due to spam measures…

For just the software side, you have a few options. Mail cow, iRedmail, and Mailinabox are very popular. Linuxbabe has instruction on how to build it from scratch using postfix. (Good to learn, but a LOT of work) But recently I stumbled on Modoboa. It does not need docker, so you can run it alone. It is not split foss with everything good behind a paywall. And it does not install unneeded apps like DNS for no reason. But keep in mind that I have only evaluated it so far and not yet put it in production.

Now for the other needs… To receive mail, you will need a static IP. Theoretically, you can get by with a dynamic DNS, but it will not go well. Your IP will change, and it will still be cached and you will lose email.

To send mail… (This is a lot more) You will need a clean static IP, with a fqdn and ptr record matching. It will need to be clean, and not in a blocked range of IPs. You will also need SPF and DKIM records, and may need dmarc. And you will need to warm up the mail server and maintain it’s cleanliness. Or you can contract out your outbound to other companies like MXroute. If you farm out your outbound, it eliminates most of the complaints above. If you have the skill, you may be able to only route Microsoft and Google destined email, and direct deliver the rest yourself. (I am working on this)