Done. And appreciate the guidance.

Rasputin will let you take a bunch of random hardware (Pi, TuringPI, LattePanda, an old laptop, etc), homogenize them, and allow you to run apps like Home Assistant, Vault Warden, etc. on them. It takes a few minutes to get up and running and has built in DNS, Certificate Authority, Tailnet, Docker deployment, an observability stack, and supports a/b updates. AGPL license.

Basically, I was sick of always having to recreate that stack every time I rebuilt the home lab. Now it’s all baked in and flashes machines with a single bash script - managed through the control plane ui.

And my first post and I already forgot the disclosure: https://github.com/geekdojo/rasputin-os/blob/main/AI_DISCLOSURE.md

I use Azure Storage Accounts - costs about $0.76 for 37GB per month. I’m still using an old Synology DS918+ but it backs up automatically to the Storage account every day. If you go that route, be sure to edit the network configuration, set it to only access from “selected networks”, and then put in your home IP or CIDR. Use that and an access token so you have at least two controls preventing the internet from accessing it.

Agree with all the comments here - old iPads make a great dashboard for Home Assistant (and most other home automation systems). If you want to wall mount it there are several vendors that offer surface or flush mount. Get yourself a poe to usb convertor and you’re done.

I might get in trouble for saying this on this channel ;) - BUT - If memory serves, Proxmox has native support for backing up to an AWS S3 bucket. I think I paid something like $3/month for it when it was setup - very minimal. While not really “self hosting”, I would argue backups are the one thing you should actually do offsite, ideally with some resiliency.