No Rest For The Weary

Here I sat, thinking that I’ve just undergone a couple of weeks of homelabbing, having upgraded a fair number of software versions. Surely I could let my homelab bake for awhile without intervention. Surely… Surely I was wrong.

I came home a week ago from work, intending to take a short break before picking up my oldest from her summer camp. Upon arriving at my garage, I used Home Assistant via CarPlay (a reason I won’t get a Rivian, as they won’t support CarPlay and do not have Home Assistant support) to run an “open home” scene to open the garage door, disable the alarm, and such. The door did not open.

A Reminder

As a quick reminder, I’ve been running Bitwarden since 2021 in a self-hosted solution.

Historical Tidbit

My Bitwarden installation is currently version 2026.2.1. I had previously attempted to upgrade to 2026.3.x, but ran into an issue with the MSSQL container described here. So I pinned my version to 2026.2.1, per the instructions you find in that thread.

The Power Interruption

Late last night while I was inadvertently drifting to sleep while watching some The Traitors NZ with my wife, the stream halted and I came to. I thought it was a temporary Internet service outage, but still went into the office to check the server rack. To my horror, I found my NAS offline. This means that at least some devices lost power. Which ones, you ask? Well, I knew exactly which ones - all of the devices connected to my APC 2200VA Smart-UPS.

As Seen Previously On This Blog

Make sure to read the previous posts in this series:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4

Home Programming

With the exception of the AWS DDNS client I had previously worked on, I didn’t have any substantial custom-written software for my home technology. That broke in a big way starting in the second half of 2020. I built a custom script to clear out what I termed to be “phantom” clients from my UniFi Controller. You can read a bit more about that project at the link.

As Seen Previously On This Blog

Make sure to read the previous posts in this series:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

Hello, Home Assistant

In early 2018 I intentionally acquired another Raspberry Pi, despite the fact that I had a Raspberry Pi 2B laying around which I wasn’t using. I got a Raspberry Pi 3B because I wanted something with more horsepower than the 2B to run Home Assistant. I had a few reasons to give Home Assistant (HA) a try:

As Seen Previously On This Blog

Make sure to read the previous posts in this series:

• Part 1
• Part 2

Smart Home Beginnings

My initial investment into smart home technology began in the middle of 2014 when my fiancee and I moved in together (henceforth, there’ll be a lot more “we” and “us” in this journey than “I” and “me”). I bought a 2nd Generation Nest Thermostat. I had just moved into a new apartment and management didn’t have a problem with my replacing the thermostat, so long as I swapped back to the original unit upon move-out (which turned out to be just a little over 2 years later). The automatic away functionality of the thermostat was nice, and it’s “learning” features worked relatively well for my use case.

As Seen Previously On This Blog

Make sure to read Part 1!

Downsizing & Reboot

In early 2011 my life changed drastically. I moved from one metropolitan area to another and left behind a substantial amount of belongings and technology… including my cat (never fear, she’s back with me today, and is still the sweetest cat you’d ever meet - that’s not hyperbole). I rented a single bedroom from a homeowner. The only networked devices I took with me were the following:

Prologue

My home network and infrastructure (and by extension, my home lab) has had quite an evolution from whenever my first WiFi network was installed. I don’t quite remember the details all the way back that far, but when I first left my father’s home would be when I setup my first WiFi home network. It was a 1-bedroom apartment, and I was entering my final semester of undergraduate college study.