LINUX Unplugged - 637: Chris' Smart Home Disaster

Episode Date: October 19, 2025

The biggest failure in seven years, right before a trip. What broke, how Chris pulled it back together, and how Wes would fix it right.Sponsored By:Managed Nebula: Meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. A decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we love. 1Password Extended Access Management: 1Password Extended Access Management is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. CrowdHealth: This open enrollment, take your power back. Join CrowdHealth to get started today for $99 for your first three months using code UNPLUGGED. Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FMHome Assistant Community Add-on: SSH & Web TerminalHomeAssistent Yellow: EmberZNet Zigbee: failed to flash firmware · Issue #146293HA Yellow/Zigbee Issue - Home Assistant CommunityHome Assistant Yellow Radio firmware - Home Assistant CommunityHome Assistant on X: "⚠️ WE'RE ENDING PRODUCTION OF THE HOME ASSISTANT YELLOW ⚠️READ: CrowdHealth - HedgeDocLenovo ThinkCentre M720q 10T7 Tiny DesktopDell OptiPlex 3070 Desktop ComputerBeelink Mini S13 Pro Mini PC,13 Generation Intel N150Minisforum MS-01 Work StationHome Assistant Connect ZWA-2Home Assistant - NixOS Wikihome-assistant/component-packages.nix at nixos-25.05READ: Unraid - HedgeDocPick: Hexecute 🪄 — Launch apps by casting spells!Pick: LenspectLenspect on Flathub — A lightweight security threat scanner intended to make malware detection more accessible and efficient.

You know, I realized, we should have, we should, you know, those cigars you got for the van success, we should have smoked those with Drew, just saying. Now we've got to go back to Denver. We keep putting off this, we keep putting off the success cigars. I think the key thing I was waiting for is what really makes them special is you smoke them while you're going down the road and you crack the windows and you get like a half a day a cigar smell going. Oh. So you and I need to be on the same road trip and West can be there too. in the backseat, and then I got another empty seat. We should play on something.

Just smoke that place out. I mean, it'll probably make it smell better. It smells like the 90s in here. Hey, I like the 90s. I like the 90s. Hello, friends, and welcome back to our weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes.

And my name is Brent. Hello, gentlemen. It's really everyone's weekly talk show. It's kind of an open source weekly talk show. And today, I'm going to confess to my biggest smart home failure in probably seven years. And it happened the night right before our Texas trip. I'll tell you what broke, how I kind of pulled it all back together, how Wes would probably fix it right, and then my future build plans. They'll round out the show with some great picks, some boost, some shoutouts, and more. So before we go any further, got to say time appropriate greetings to that virtual lug. Hello, Muffle Room. There's one of you in the audience. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. I'll say it for everyone. Hello. Oh, I see Minimax up there staging. We have Otterbrain inbound and a bunch of people up and quiet listening too. Everybody's sneaking in right under the deadline, right as the intro music's going. Also, a big good morning to define.net slash unplugged. Go meet Define networking.

And they have Managed Nebula, a decentralized VPN that's built on the open source Nebula platform. It's really awesome. Talk about having full control of your infrastructure. and Nebula is optimized for speed, simplicity, and industry-leading security. You can fully self-host it, or you can take advantage of their managed product, 100 devices for free, when you go to defined.net slash unplugged. Nebula got started, really battle-tested in 2017, to secure Slack's global infrastructure. Now it's used by enterprises all over the world to connect their infrastructure. It's used by home labors. It's even used by Rivian in their automobiles on the road to communicate back to Rivian HQ.

It's super powerful. It's very flexible. You can go from manage to your own self-hosted, and I mean, you control everything. It's great. So go get started with up to 100 hosts, absolutely free. No credit card required. Go to Defined.net slash unplugged.

Now, we have just, I wanted to say thanks again, not a lot in the housekeeping, but thank you again to everybody who made, I think, one of the best trips we've done in a while. I think it was my favorite trip of the year. What made it your favorite? Well, the race was a good part of it. was a lot of fun, racing down. Only because you won.

No, I think it would have been fun either way. I think that would have, because it was just a good challenge. Yeah, I mean, we got to see a bunch of the country. We ran into listeners and like various interesting things along the way. And right then the destination, we got to see you and your cats and see the van again and see everybody at Texas Linux Fest and visit Austin, which is always a good time. Plus, we were able to swing by System 76 and Drew, which we hadn't planned for it at all when we set out on the voyage. So I think in terms of like both achieving what we set out for and like you know the randomness of the road rolled in our favor yeah it was it was nice to have the flexibility and have the creative

license that the audience trusted us with to go out there and do it and then having an event in October and it'll be November next year it's it's just it was the right amount of time after just event after event after event and we sort of had a breather so it was we were recharge and ready to go again. So I thought it was the best trip. I guess you probably partied pretty hard in Nick's Vegas. That's true. Yeah, that was also a spectacular trip, but I didn't have you guys with me.

So, you know, I can only hit so high. We also have some good news. After a lot of hard work by Mr. West Payne, our Matrix server is back online. Yeah, sorry about that, everyone. Thanks for your patience. several billion state group state rows later here we are many yeah multiple numbers of billions yeah it was a lot yeah and more than a terabyte of data gone yeah in a good way yeah um so there's been some account cleanups yeah yeah main thing here is mostly just well let us know if you see

stuff that's broken and in particular we suspended a bunch of stale accounts but if we suspended anyone by mistake do reach out let us know okay so So, I mean, I've been doing the smart home thing for a while, tinkered with various different platforms, you know, the Amazon platform, the Google platform, the Apple platform, but inevitably would burn out on them or would have some sort of issue. About seven years ago, I think I discovered Home Assistant. And it really started, kicked off the, I'd say, smart home lifestyle. And it's been now, it's, I only buy things that will integrate with home. home assistant and they integrate out of the box so I don't do the thing where I buy a smart product and see later on maybe I can make it work with home assistant it's kind of like the

dance Linux users are used to right yes it's very much that you buy hardware with your software in mind yeah I think in both cases right it's gotten better yes very much so but you know just to underscore it like when the device goes in whether it be a fan or a heater or a bug controller or lights for a barbecue area or a heater in a bathroom or whatever It's integrated into home assistant first, and that's how it's always used initially. It's never used in the way it comes out of the box. So to say it's integrated into my home, my home is essentially a robot. I mean, it really is.

And it has made our quality of life better because we live in a small space. And having just climate control that is smart is really good. But also what I learned later on into my home assistant journey is, and something I don't think newbies out there that haven't gone down this path yet realize is it's very useful to have data. So if you have not deployed home assistant or you're a smart home skeptic, please listen to this next point. Having various bits of data about power usage in your home, water usage, if you have solar, your solar production, water leaks, motion and presence logs, even long-term things. Like I have sensors in my fridge and my freezer.

And I can see if it's not performing as well over time. And so I can start to budget. for a new fridge before my refrigerator fails. These are really powerful tools that I don't think people realize are available to them before they've gone down this journey. So it's extremely useful. Like, I could just never go back, at least not while living in Joub's. But recently, I had one of the worst failures ever. And it was the worst kind of timing.

I was telling the boys about it. It happened within a 24-hour window before we left for Austin. and I realized it literally the night I was packing because I went to hit a button and nothing happened. Oh, that's odd. Oh, I can imagine. I can almost feel the sinking feeling, right?

At first, you're writing it off. Your brain's trying to explain it all the way. Yeah. Oh, it's probably a temporary failure. Yeah, how bad could it be? And then the evidence starts piling up. How bad, Wes? How bad could it be?

The other thing I noticed is in my office slash the bathroom because Jupes is a small space after all. The automatic lighting and heating wasn't working. And so like when you enter the room, presence is detected, and a W-L-E-D light strip that's in a diffuser that spans the length of the wall turns on and in the night it's a real soft ambient glow

and during the day it's a little brighter and it just wasn't triggering at all. And I noticed the heat wasn't triggering. So I start doing the math and I'm like, oh, these are all Zigby devices. These are all Zygby devices that are not working. So I sit down at Old Home Assistant, and the first thing I noticed is I had never seen this before, but there was an update pending for my Zygby radio.

And then just as a refresher here, you have like smart devices of all kinds, right? Like Wi-Fi connected, Zygby connected, and Z-Wave connected. And this is particularly a Zygby issue. Yes. So not everything was broken. wasn't obvious at first, because a lot of things are Z-Waver Wi-Fi, but it's the really low-power, cheap stuff, because Zigby is 2.4 gigahertz-based. You don't have to get it licensed. And so it brings the cost down. It's like a lot of little plugs and buttons and stuff are Zigby. I won't be buying

those anymore. But, so I saw this firmware update, which I'd never seen before for my home assistant yellow's built-in Zigby radio adapter. And I didn't apply it, because I kind of wanted to figure out why things weren't working. I did later install it as a truck. double shooting. I was like, you know, when you're at the yellow stage, you're like, all right, I'll try the firmware update. Right, at this point. Is it going to break worse? I don't know. Right, exactly. I did get to that point, but I wasn't there yet. So I popped into the Zigby integration, and I noticed that it was in a failed to initialize state. And I noticed something was off. Home Assistant now listed two identical Zigby radios that had the same

duplicate devices. One was labeled, like the Home Assistant Yellow Zigby, and one was labeled HubZ Zigby Comport controller. Did I maybe, did I connect a second one? Right? That's so strange. You're like halfway through a switch or playing with something, forgot about it, and never went back. The thing rebooted, now it sees it.

Aren't you planning on buying an upgrade? Yeah. I thought, well, I was like, maybe I wanted to, right. I was like, maybe I was going to set up an upgrade or something like that. So, you know, I'm looking LS USB. Then I physically look at the device. I'm like, no, I only have one radio on this thing. What's going on here?

you know, maybe there was something I had done wrong. But as far as I could tell, a second ghost adapter had just shown up. And I didn't really know what to do. I turned on the debug logs. They told me that, you know, the Zigby service couldn't start. All of the online stuff says, well, maybe you have another integration that's conflicting. I did not. So I yolowed in and I decided I'm going to delete one of these adapters.

But I don't know which one to delete. Do I delete the one that's named correctly or this new ghost one that shows up? I don't know, Brian, which one, in this case, which adapter rolling the dice would you delete? Well, and I feel like you didn't necessarily look, you haven't looked at this in the past because it's just like a thing you don't need to worry about. So you don't actually have a memory of what it's named. You didn't put a custom name on this adapter or anything. It's just like a 50-50? Yeah.

Oh, gosh. I guess, I guess I would want to delete the one that didn't sound like. like Linux had named it. Okay, but in theory, Home Assistant was configured to work with the correctly named one. Yes. But was not working.

Correct. That was my thinking. Yeah, okay. I can see the argument. So I went ahead and I deleted the one labeled Home Assistant Yellow Zigby adapter. Wow. And that's the built-in.

Wow. No, I didn't know. And it's like, do I just lose all my devices? And my... Oh, right. Is this like a cascade delete? That'll just... Right.

Okay. And I have to repair it. everything or something. And then also I'm doing the math on like the cost. Could I, could I just replace them with Zigby versions? But it's like 30-ish devices. So maybe even more. It might be 60. I don't know. It's a lot of devices.

It's between 60 and 30. This is an unbudgeted cost here. Exactly. This is how you know you have a problem. Well, you know, there's a lot of sensors. There's a lot of sensors. And motion. And open and close sensors. So I delete the one that's properly labeled, and I just hope that the generic HubZ Zigby Comport controller one is the correct one. I delete it, and I reboot the box because there isn't a built-in way to just restart

Zigby. Yeah, you just got to restart Home Assistant and reboot the whole box. So I did that, and it came back up, and my Zigby devices were just working. And the Zygmee integration started, and apparently I randomly picked the right one to delete, and everything resumed. So I've been trying to track down what kind of happened here. And my best guess is a firmware update. Maybe I did apply it, and I don't remember, or it was partially applied automatically. It somehow changed the state of the radio, and the Linux system underneath ended up exposing multiple serial endpoints or something.

uh when this happened and then there was a conflict the firmware update couldn't continue and things ended in the sort of hung state the Zigby integration saw both endpoints trying to connect to it and by deleting the non-functional entry i forced the Zigby integration to rebind to the working controller even though maybe both were working i don't know and then restored the network but i'm not sure and the thing that sucks is the entire time i was in texas none of the Zigby devices were working so a lot of the you know, presence detection stuff was just broken. And you couldn't do anything. You were on the road. Couldn't do anything. And I have no idea what caused it, really. And you hadn't, like, done some big update. Obviously, you hadn't done the firmware update.

That would maybe make sense if the name changed post firmware, but... I agree. I have a theory. Uh-huh. Please. Your dear, lovely wife has been listening to you gripe about that, you know, you need a new controller. So she got some advice from, you know, close friends and got a new one and tried to, like, in the night, plug it in, and see if it just kind of worked.

And then all of a sudden everything went wrong, and she just quietly hit it and returned it to Amazon. I like this theory, but wouldn't you be implicated in this story, most likely? I'm just trying to save her at this point. I did think it was funny. The day after I solved all of this, not related, but the day after I solved all of this, the home assistant team posted on X at their ending production of the home assistant yellow.

They're going to continue to support it. so it's still going to get patches and updates but it's no longer in production is it possible like home assistant did some sort of auto updates that happened I have to go in and turn them on it could have been it could have happened after the last OS update and I didn't notice at first because so many things

were still working because like Brent said it's one of these things that you don't really think about it has been so consistent and so reliable and thankfully this turned out to be a pretty minor thing to correct the implications and the risk were high but it was pretty minor thing

but I it has got me thinking about like what to do in the future right because this was stuff that was just shipped on the device right you kind of just bought this one box to run home assistant with Zigby built in and now it's out of production so you can't just hot swap into a new one

can't just hot swap I mean it'll be supportive for a while but and also I think I'm outgrowing this even you know I noticed especially when we built Brent's new home assistant I just don't quite have enough horsepower. But I also, I kind of been rethinking the way to do my mobile home lab and change up the hardware in general. And it seems like maybe this, this home assistant yellow going out of, you know, going end of life and might need to kind of rework my home lab hardware in my RV for my mobile home lab. The two things are kind of coming together.

And I'm kind of starting to form a plan. OnePassword.com slash unplug. That's the number one. password, and then it's unplugged, it's all lowercase. Go there to take the first steps for better security for your team, for your company, by securing credentials and protecting every application. Even the unmanaged stuff you didn't know about. Learn more at onepassword.com slash unplugged. If your employees are bypassing security to use unapproved apps, they might not even realize they're doing it. They probably feel they have to do it to just get their job done. And you can

kind of connect with that viewpoint, but it's a very challenging position for, you know, IT. And if you're experiencing this, you're not alone. Fortunately, OnePassword extended access management will help you get your hands around this. You can be careful about security, but you can't help it if users are going up and signing up for things and signing up for applications. Perhaps you're even already paying for it, but they're doing it under their own credentials. This is where Trellica by OnePassword really comes in. It inventories every app and use at your company. They have pre-populated app profiles that can assess the different risks, and they let you manage access, optimize your spend, and enforce best security practices across all the

apps your employees are actually using. That's right. And for me, the thing that I was always struggling with and every client I always went to seem to struggle with, they needed a process to securely onboard and offboard staff. Sometimes you'd have one that would last for a little while, but you really want something these days that'll also help you meet compliance goals. Well, Trellica by One Password provides a complete solution for that. access governance is solved and it's just one of the ways extended access management helps the team

and you strengthen compliance and security you know about one password and their award winning password manager of course it's trusted by millions of users take a second and ask yourself how many SaaS applications are being used at your company right now if you can't keep count you're not alone so go to one password dot com slash unplug take the first steps to better security for your team by securing credentials and protecting every application even the unmanaged stuff. It's really powerful. It's a great way to support the show, and you can learn more by going to OnePassword.com slash unplugged. That's all lowercase. It's the number one password.com slash unplugged. Check compliance off your list with a system of record for your app inventory

and employee lifecycle workflows. OnePassword.com slash unplugged. Join CrowdHealth.com slash unplugged. If you followed me for a while, you know I have really struggled with trying to figure out health care. A small business that's a really small team, there's really no great options. My wife also is a type one diabetic, and so that makes things extra expensive for her, and she also runs her own small business. This has been something that has just really been a big stressor for us, but if you've noticed, I haven't really complained about it much recently. That's because just over three years ago, I joined crowd health, and right now it's open enrollment, the season where the health insurance companies are going

to hope you sign up. Even though things are getting overpriced, they're becoming a political football and there's lots of confusing fine print. But don't take my word for it. Go over there, check it out, just see if it might make sense for you and your family. Drawingcrowdehealth.com slash unplugged. I wouldn't be talking about it if I hadn't tried this for myself and my wife for a long time. And it's something I'm very comfortable with. In fact, it's something that gives me peace of mind. I found the entire game of trying to pick insurance, pay the different prices all the time, and then of course, you know on the back end they generally try to weasel out of actually helping you. Crowd health is different. It's a community of people funding

each other's medical bills directly. No middlemen, no networks, no nonsense. Now, for me, when I signed up, I didn't really know what I'd be getting into because it's a new idea, but crowd health is actually something that's been around for a while. The idea is just modernized with the ability to have apps and the internet. And now, three years into it, I'm really glad we went this route, and we have saved a ton of money. You've got to check out crowd health. The health insurance alternative. Health care for under $100. You get access to a team of health bill negotiators, low-cost prescription and lab testing tools, as well as a database of low-cost, high-quality doctors that are vetted by crowd health. They also have a fantastic app that they have improved on over

the three years that I have been a member. And it just makes it so easy to get started with the process. From, oh, I think something's wrong to, hey, I have a bill. It really is pretty powerful. And if something major happens, you pay the first $500. And then crowd health steps in with the crowd to fund the rest. It feels like the options we used to have before Obamacare, in my opinion, messed everything up. As a small business owner, it has been disastrous since then, especially if you have two of us in the family. And of course, you'll join the crowd, a group of members just like you that want to help pay for each other's unexpected medical events. The system is betting that you'll stay stuck. You'll just use the

same overpriced, overcomplicated mess. And this year, it's even more complicated because most of the ACA subsidies are set to expire, which means your prices could go sky high. So far, crowd health members have saved over $40 million in health care expenses because they refuse to overpay for health care. This is open enrollment. Take your power back. Join crowd health to get started. Join the crowd with me for $99 for your first three months.

$99. Just use the promo code unplugged at join crowdhealth.com. Join crowdhealth.com. promo code unplugged. CrowdHealth is not insurance. Opt out. Take your power back. This is how we win.

Join me over at joincrowdealth.com. promo code unplugged. Now, Chris, you and I care quite a lot about power usage. And, well, you mentioned how stats is a game changer for you. So I don't imagine that's top of mind for you in designing this potential new situation. The next gen build. Can I call it that? I don't know.

Is that too corny? but it feels really I feel like it's going to be my next gen build. Yeah, obviously Raspberry Pies could be one route. You get like a max of 10 watts there. Yeah, did you jump off at the four? When did you make your, okay. So there is at least a generation of change. The end, of course, the N100 or N150 Intel platform, pretty competitive.

Eight to 12 watts win idle. Not bad. Not too bad. And then there's the optimized TMM mini PC chips, seven to 12 watts when idle. And then, of course, you know, a desktop PC is going to be like, what, 45 watts, something like that when idle. That's not really an option. If you're running off of a lithium battery bank and solar, every little watt counts because it's always going, right? It's a cumulative thing.

So I think... Oh, that's why you didn't include zion on the... Right. I think my ideal would be like an N-100, N-150, low-power X-86 PC that runs everything. So right now I have a pie hole and I have a... a Raspberry Pi that does camera feeds when I turn it on, and then I have an O-Droid that runs my entire self-hosting home stack, basically all the applications we talk about on this show.

It's got to be damn near 30 apps running on that thing. And on the top of the list, Jellyfin and NextCloud and Ersats TV and, you know, like really important stuff that I use every single day. So it's like a pretty critical box. And why not replace that? Oh, and then I have the Home Assistant Yellow. Why not replace all of those with one mini PC if possible? That would be the ideal, right?

But Home Assistant Jellyfin and all the R tools and Image and NextCloud and ERSats, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Put that all on one system using VMs. But I think I'm worried, and I would really like the audience's feedback here because I'm kind of hoping to do this early 2026. I don't know if I can find a box powerful enough to host all that because I want a significant upgrade. for Home Assistant. But then I want the headroom to run all of this stuff and things like Image and Ersatz TV that need hardware acceleration.

And you're not really willing to cut things, at least to start, right? So, yeah, you want more, but your power budget isn't more. Right. But, Chris, I remember your argument when you were orchestrating this current build was you wanted Home Assistant on its own device

so that if the machine you keep adding more VMs to decides to, you know, not go so hot, then your home stays consistent and stays constant and you're never tinkering with that particular application. So why the move away from that philosophy? I think it's a great philosophy. I blame Wes. What did I do? Well, we were talking about it last night, and we'll get into it more. And it just sort of like it, when you're switching to the Intel platform and you're using more power, I can't have multiple boxes. like that's where my power savings has to come from is I eliminate some of the boxes because it's not just right it's like then I'm going to put as much storage into these things

as possible they're going to have external devices plugged into them that draws power so as a matter of compromise I think I'm going to go to VM isolation for like things like home assistant or something and just do one box it's not really my preference but because I want to get more out of home assistant I would like to increase the performance of home assistant I think I'm at the limits of what I'm going to get from the arm platforms right now It could be wrong. But it's something that's like, I don't know if it's out there, an N150 that takes 32 gigs of RAM and you could put up to 8 terabytes of storage in is such a thing out there. I'm not so sure.

I was also looking at maybe some of the quote-unquote enterprise hardware, like a Think Center M720Q or an Optiplex 3070. Have you looked at these? Yeah, only a little bit. They're really impressive little boxes for the size and the price. So even if, so I think for some people, they're probably exactly what you would. would need right now. Like the Think Center M7020Q is $205. It has an I5-800-T, which means it's the low-power variant.

And it has 8 gigs of RAM, but I'm pretty sure it goes up to 32. Yeah, that's the key detail right there. Mm-hmm. And the Optiplex. They really are a great. Lean, mean, again, an I-5-9500 T, 256 gigabyte SSD in there. But you can pop it up, I believe, yeah, it says right. here, up to 32 gigabytes of 266 megahertz DDR4.

Now, if this could take the storage, I don't know. But so these little enterprise, this one's although $550. So I don't know about that. What about heat management? Because I know your current boxes are sort of solid state, right? They don't have moving fans or anything like that. And you have them in a little cupboard. So have you thought about this aspect?

Yeah, yeah. That's a good question. It does get hot in there. The odroid H3 has survived, though. The H4 might be enough for all of this. Over in Matrix, Swami comes in with a Minis Forum MSO1 workstation what they're using. Hmm. Okay.

To me, it feels like... Up to 24 terabytes of SST storage. Like, there's like this trifecta problem. You can have speed, you can have power efficiency, or you can have all the storage and gadgets. and I'm trying to, like, have all three. And maybe I'm not over-asking, but just my initial look here. Oh, this is really nice, though. So this is $480, U.S. Greenbacks.

And it has a 13th generation I-9, 24 terabytes of SSD storage up to, PCI-4. My question would be is, what is its idle draw? Yeah, that was going to be my question. See, an I-9-2,900-H, I don't know what the power draw is on that. It's really hard. I know this. I've really enjoyed the yellow.

It's really been a nice sweet spot here on the power to performance ratio. Do they have any other first-party hardware that interests you? Not really. No, just the power isn't really there. They have a blue, and I want something more robust. It's fine. But when you think about it, what I'm trying to get is I want the web pages to render faster. I want the dashboard to render faster.

Because when you're trying to do something really quick, You want the best performance possible. So now I'm trying to get to like, okay, how do I get this? And I think I'm at the limits of what, you know, a CM4 can deliver me there. But also, okay, so I have not figured out the hardware, but that's sort of the direction I'm trending, if possible, is an N150 or a T-series chip that gets me the performance I want. I have no idea if there's anything in the Risen world that would do this. I would love to hear about that if anybody could boost in or send us an email with that. or my other option is

run multiple boxes get really crappy cheap and one hundreds and run a couple of those but yeah do you have the budget for two if the price is right you know just one home home assistant and maybe a couple other related

you know services that fit the domain if the price was right and the power draw worked out I really can't afford to spend any more power that's the most expensive thing for me right now because the current system is drawing a little bit more than I'd like I think the other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to phase out Zigby. I'm just going to start replacing those devices. My next build is going to use that new fancy Home Assistant Connect ZWA2, Z wave, that is really, really good.

So that'll be my future plan. I'm going to phase out Zigby. I like the idea behind it, but it just hasn't worked for me. But I have a sense, West, that, you know, me kind of yoloing and deleting adapters and then replicating Home Assistant OS in a VM on a new box, I don't know. I just have a feeling maybe not how you would do it. So how would you fix it right, Dr. Wes? Oh, I don't know if you could really call it fixing it right, but have you ever considered your old pal Nix-O-Wess? Oh, why am I not surprised?

Brett, are you surprised? I saw this coming from a mile away. You know, actually, I might have a better time on the sales pitch to Brent because he started out new. Yeah, yeah. And I think probably the main difficulty for you is you just have a lot of functionality that you don't want to give up and you would need to. to port. A lot of add-ons, little silly things like UI tweaks and new cards and new ways to graph things that come into like the add-on store and whatnot. Although maybe it's possible to add the add-on store through Nix, I have no idea. No, I don't think so. They don't

explicitly support it, at least with the module. I mean, you could do it on your own because I think the add-ons are mostly Docker containers. Yes, exactly. So you could run those or like what I'm doing is a lot of them just have NixOS modules for what you're running, right? So like music assistant set of an add-on it's just another service that I run at the Nix OS layer and it's just in a different tab yeah yeah so there are some changes that you have to get used to we started looking into this a little bit because I am currently running it this way and I thought I'd be interesting to kind of look and see some of the things like that you know does it have enough of the stuff that you might need it is kind of great because they do support I mean I think they say they

have something like they support like 90 plus percent of like the built-in stuff a lot of it's Python and so anything that has you know that if they have the dependency package for that it makes it very easy to get get that added to your setup and so you can add any of the sort of extra components that you might want but also you can do custom components and they support the custom lovely modules as well and so you just sort of add all of the ones that you want into your config right there's services dot home assistant so like i added checking out stuff you were using mushroom clock weather card mini graph card LG webOS remote control i mean i'm not And he's like, so I don't have a WebOS TV at the moment, but just to see, you know, and then you rebuild and that's it.

I mean, you still got to go in and, you know, customize it. I think there's ways to do even more stuff declaratively. But for the most part, I've just used it to get, like, all the dependencies and the core stuff set up and running, and then I can go from there. Have you gone through an update cycle or so with Home Assistant? Yeah, it's been going for more than a couple of months. Yeah, I think at one point with ESP Home, I disabled it for one update cycle. I wasn't doing anything with it at the moment. anyway so it was pretty easy and I could have pinned it if I'd cared to but that hasn't been

a problem since it is um the way I have it set up I am building like home assistant most of the updates so that does take you know 10 minutes or so depending on the power of the box you using this is not an especially powerful box but that has not had any issues at all so and I don't really mind that because this is another box that I kind of run things I don't need to update a ton and are more of the infrastructure layer it's also my router more occasional updates yeah I love that you put it on your router, you maniac. Also, his router is an Xbox, yes. Yeah.

Which also doesn't need to do very much. And so I update it like once or twice a month, basically, unless there's like a serious security thing or something. So yeah, so in that domain, it's worked quite nicely. So the thing, what you're saying that I do like is I like the idea of a implicitly defined home assistant setup, because that feels a little more appliance-like, especially at the level of dependency that I have. because what I have now is a bunch of docker containers that are being orchestrated by the Home Assistant Supervisor container.

And while it's been fine, that's always been sort of like, it seems like a potential area of issues. But they actually do a great job in practice. But I like the idea of a defined home assistant setup that's easy to replicate. Then, you know, that would be really nice for, and I wish I would now thinking about this,

I wish I would have done this years ago because I'm, I need to redo Home Assistant at the studio, probably next year. I have Home Assistant that I'm going to redo for Hadea office. I'm going to do a second implementation there. It'd be really nice to have all of that actually set and easy to replicate. You know, really this came up

because you were detailing to us privately some of your struggles, right? And I mean, at first I was just laughing because you wanted robust stuff and you mentioned Z-Wave JS. Yeah. But more realistically, you mentioned that you had to install an SSH add-on to troubleshoot. Yes, that's

so true. Yeah, because everything's containers, yeah. I was just laughing at NixOS. Yeah, yeah. But no, realistically, there's a lot of trade-offs. And I don't know that this would really be right for you, but I'd be curious. You could try it incrementally, right? That's what I'd be curious to see is, you know, I think for me, for minimal setups, things where you don't have, you know, you can kind of adapt how you build it to the limitations and the strengths, that's a different domain than porting an existing maxed out, uh,

yeah, all the add-ons, tech van lifestyle. Yeah, hundreds of devices. Uh-huh. Yeah, totally. Chris, do you worry about moving away from the officially supported OS way of running home assistant and doing a build your own? Do you worry about this, I don't know, stability or supportedness of that? No, I mean, if you run it, if you run Home Assistant OS in a VM, that would be a supported configuration. If you go out in the crazy way that, the crazy, scary way that Wes is talking about, that would necessarily be supported. But that doesn't concern me either, I suppose. Yeah, right. That's another part of the trade office. I'm kind of given up that for the ability to do it the next way, the benefits that may or may not have.

for you and it's easier for me to hack on it a little bit that way just because now I'm a Knicks guy. All right. But to your point, just really quick, is, right, you can also definitely, you know, if you did want, if you already, we're trying to deploy it on NixOS infrastructure, you could definitely run an NIV or a container. Yeah. Right.

Just as you get on any base. Before we get off this, is it, how do you say your name in the moment? Is it Deidreel, Deidreel? How do I say it? Deidreel. So you have the yellow, but you've popped to CM5 in your yellow. yellow. How's that working? I've been running it for over a year. It's been solid. The only issue I have is some smart plugs I have. The integration is glitchy and known to have to restart it, but

that's just the integration itself. Nothing to do with the yellow itself. Do you want to out the vendor? Some Chinese knockoff. Oh, okay. All right. So you're telling me, you're telling me I pop off the top, I pop the top on the yellow, and I can just take the CM4 out and I can in a new CM5 and I'm going to get a better, faster oh, but isn't the EMMC built into the you, yeah, you back up your

home assistant first and then wipe and then swap it out and then you reinstall home assistant reload your config and boom your backup and running. Have you had any problems with your Zigby radio? I don't, I'm just getting into it. My wife doesn't let me buy

fun toys like that. Go Z wave. That's my my advice goes anyway. Okay, well, okay, so that also could be a time buyer. And did you notice a performance differential when you went CM5? Because that's my other concern is I go through the effort, I pay the money, I pop it in there, I reload the OS, and it's like a 10, 20% improvement, which would be okay. I was actually running it out of a Docker container before on a quite powerful host that shouldn't have had any issues running it. And by going to a standalone box, I did notice a performance improvement just by going to stand alone, letting it be dedicated

and not running my R stack next to it. Granted, that stack is idle most of the time, but still. Right, when it does run, stealing from home assistant. Yeah, okay. See, I got too many choices here, guys. I really, I think this is an area where I could really appreciate some experience and input there. Like, that's a great option. If that CM5 buys me some time.

I think maybe what I should do there is, uh, regardless of what I do, put a CM5 in that thing and deploy it somewhere else, you know? It sounds fun to try. Yeah, it's still got some good life in it, I think. Huh, all right. Well, please do boost in

or go to Linuxunplug.com slash contact and let me know how you would do it. You know, maybe we get a poll going, the audience decides your hardware. I don't just say. I want to nail it right. Ideally, it's something that lasts me another seven years, five years.

You know, something I can put in that is a nice long-term. Andrew didn't have something to recommend to other, The one really nice thing about going the prescribed home assistant OSPath, VM, or be it on physical hardware, is the backup and restore is really top-notch. And if you have a Nebuchasa account, they also store a version of the backup encrypted in cloud storage. So now you can just restore from the cloud like it's a freaking iPhone or Android or something and restore it right onto the hardware and get right back to where you're at. So the going from failure, I got to switch to a new box to fully recovered scenario is really strong.

If you go the blessed route, if you'll call it that, which is one thing to consider. But I think if you went the Nix route, like Wes is suggesting, by its very nature, it's so replicable that if you could just restore the data, you're probably going to be fine. Yeah, you know, copy over Varlib, Nix, Wes, or home assistant, I mean. You know, I mean, is it crazy to run it on the router? Because I could also, I, hmm, yes. That was just super convenient for me when I was rebuilding my home lab. I'm not trying to recommend that per se. The router just wasn't doing anything else, so it was dedicated hardware I could use.

Well, I could see some advantages. It is one less piece of hardware. And my router, it's mostly some NF tables rules, really. And I, something about, I just love the ludicrous idea of your critical home assistant system being on a box connected to the public internet. Like, it's just so dumb. It's, I love it. I also, you know, there's so many meshes these days. Like, I don't have to have any photo ports and stuff.

That's exactly how you would do. Unraid.net slash unplugged. Unleash your hardware with Unraid. A powerful, easy-to-use NAS operating system. For those of you that want control, flexibility, efficiency, and you want to just take advantage of some of the apps we talk about with what you have in the closet right now. build your ultimate rig

or take advantage of that laptop sitting in the corner. You can really unleash the hardware that you have right now. And Unraid is cooking, my friends. The new RC is out for version 7.20. 5,000 different Unraid members help test the RC. That's awesome.

They have lots of nice fixes, polish across storage, VMs, the web GUI, and the stable is just around the corner. Unraid goes from win to win. And recently, they have been laser focused on making that web UI even better. Their community app store is bonkers. You get access to support, to the community, to all of those apps,

and the continuous improvements of Unraid built on top of a modern Linux kernel, which means you get the best in virtualization, the best in containers, and the best in file systems. So check out UnRade and support the show. You get a 30-day free trial, which lets you test out UnRade, no credit card required, when you go to UnRade.net slash unplugged. It's pretty powerful, and it just keeps getting better, and they just recently crossed the 20-year mark. And it feels like they've got all the steam and energy from, like, a startup.

It's really pretty impressive. Check it out, support the show. Unraid.net slash unplugged. Well, we'd like to do a shout-out to new member Giovanni, who joined as a core contributor. Thank you, Giovanni. Thank you. Hope you're enjoying. I will say, last week's bootleg had some extra road trip clip.

and stuff like that, great, great bootleg if you are just signing up or you haven't grabbed them yet. Go do it. And thank you for becoming a core contributor. Appreciate that very much. And gentlemen, we do have some boosts. And Derivision Dingus is our baller booster this week

with 72,22 sets. Hey, Rich Lobster! That's a nice one. Thank you, Derivation. So sorry I miss sending my config. I've been behind on shows, but I had to boost in my vote for more of this content. I really enjoyed this episode and would love to participate in a second round. That said, guys, for the love of God, please give Home Manager a try.

I've replaced the vast majority of my individual dot files with Nix modules because of Home Manager. It's so nice to have everything in one spot and in one format. Highly recommend. We knew this day would come. We've been resisting this for almost as long as we resisted Nix. Almost. But, uh, I, I just, you know, my, my hesitation is I just feel like I'm really going all in at that point, but I think I already have.

All right. We got to try it. We got to try it. I need to know, is there like recommended setups? Well, especially because we can clean up your config. My goodness, I know. Every time I'm working and I'm vibing on hyper vibe, well, not every time, but very frequently it's like, okay, now I can do this with an activation script, but if we used Home Manager, let's get told me that all the time. I'm sure it has.

He goes on, I've been using Hyperland and NixOS for years at this point, and in my opinion, it is a match made in heaven. Hyperland has really come a long way since the early days, and it has first class NixOS support the whole time. I've been using it. It really is cool to see some people appreciating all the work being done over there. It really does deserve the attention. I feel like it made my computer fun and exciting again. I'll plus one then. It's just enough desktop.

It really has been pretty great, and the combination. of just the way I can configure it simply and the instant reloads and the way it does tile, it just tiles very intelligently, plus you can do support for some floating windows if you want. I really like it. It's all I have to say about that.

And I do think it is a match made in heaven. I agree. And thank you for that boost. Appreciate it. Show mascot, the Golden Dragon, boost in with a row of ducks. The Golden Dragon! Boosting in 636,

Love the episode, great road talk, and interview with John. Oh, thank you. We had a lot of fun. And it was really great of John to be able to join us live like that. We were really down to the wire. And we pushed through some technical difficulties. Pabby boosted in a row of ducks. Plus one for the config confessions.

Have to get around to cleaning up my next config sometime. All right. I think that's a plus two so far for this. I don't know. Three or four, at least. I think we're getting in the green light category, boys. That's exciting. That's really cool.

I wasn't sure. At first, it was sort of a slow start, but now we're hearing it. We're hearing it. If you disagree, now's the time. Just pump the brakes right there. You can let us know, but things are cooking. Things are cooking. All right, Kiwi Bitcoin Guide comes in with 5,432 sats. The traders love the ball. Time Traveler Boost. I'm going back over episodes about file systems. Who knew that you could customize the file system in your OS?

Wow. I know, things we take for granted now. No kidding, right? if you're just coming from more traditional devices. Yeah, especially Windows and Mac OS. Like, not a lot of options there. Now, that does mean you kind of, you know, sometimes have to choose and debate why to choose and which, but that's part of the fun.

That's true. Could you explain the difference between corporate distros like Ubuntu and Pop OS and community distros, pros, cons, tradeoffs, that kind of thing? Almost an episode topic there. Oh, yeah. It's a big thread to pull. Well, the corporate distros generally have paid staff to maintain and develop them

and work on certain pain points, but they also have an overall corporate mission that they're trying to deliver via that desktop. Now, if you agree with that and align with that, that's probably just fine. Community distributions can be a little bit more chaotic in their structure and their organization, but don't necessarily have any particular enterprise end goal

or KPI that they must meet or a certain thing of value that they must return to the organization making it, so they can be useful in that way. And I think my experience has been over the, years just have naturally gravitated towards the community-maintained distributions overall, not for any particular criticism against Ubuntu or Papua. I think they're both really fantastic, and I think the people in charge of them really

have their best interest in mind. But it just seems to be where I've naturally gravitated to over the years. Yeah, and, you know, it kind of depends on what you're doing. If you do align well with what, you know, the corporate distros in particular are trying to do, if you could be a potential customer even or you won't support eventually, things like that, then, you know, this can be really nice. And, right, they do have an ability to sort of set the bar or, you know, pay people to work on certain things in certain areas. So if those are areas that are important to you, that might be something that you appreciate.

But the downside can be that you, you know, if you diverge from that, they don't always necessarily bend over backwards to support. I mean, it's still open source often, right, and so there is a lot of community involvement around corporate distros as well. But you just kind of get a different experience in, you know, the support use cases and the diversity of what people are doing with some of the community ones. Maybe the best place to see this in action is the delta between Debian and Ubuntu and Fedora and Sentos Stream and REL, right, where you can really see the community side, even though you could argue that Red Hat still is somewhat involved in Fodor, it's very much community-led. And you see, like, the differences is they have ButterfS on Workstation now for multiple releases. That's still not in REL. And so they can experiment a bit more in some cases as well. Great question.

I feel like I could talk about that for an hour. Love it. If you have any other questions like that, Kiwi, please do send them in. Chris B, Boosted with 5,000 cents. This is the way. If you're reading this, my very first crypto transaction was successful. Sent using self-hosted Bitcoin, L&D, and Boost, CLI. Keep up the great work.

What? That's awesome. Very impressive. That is a lot. As a first. Wow. That is crazy as a first. That's zero to like 300. Crispy, very, very impressive. And even Boost the LI. It's been ages since we've had a BucciLI boost. You'll find as you get into Bitcoin, some really don't like the association of crypto and Bitcoin.

There's Bitcoin and then there's everything else. But we're here. We're much more friendly folk. And we really am impressed. Well done. Well freaking done. That's Eagle for you, sir. Eagle for you. Well, Kaspilin boosted in three boosts for a total of 6,300 sats. You're doing a good job. Now, this is on episode 329, flat network truthers. Funny nowadays, Colonel 5.5, Pison 32-bit, Manjero, Bevaldi, 12 cores, all amazing. I miss those times, those deep dives. I was looking for info about Nebula.

So thanks for the work. Thank you. I think, right? Yeah, thank you for the support. And he's saying we should do more deep dives. And I agree on that. Just a wee bit. A wee bit of a deep dive.

You know, or an in-depth look could be that, too, a wee bit of a deep dive. Right then. Let's get ourselves settled in for a wee deep dive. Yeah. If you have deep dive, I don't know, curiosities. You send them right along and we'll see what we can do. I love nerdy down on kernel releases. I do kind of like, you know, the callbacks.

There have been various different eras, too, right? If you've just been following the desktop Linux world. and, yeah, from Colonel 5,5, and, yeah, the different versions of the pie, the browser war, there's just been a lot, there's a lot. And there still is, Wes, there still is. And some of us haven't processed that. Sometimes it's too much, Wes.

Sometimes there's too much. Ed Broughton's here with 12,345 sets. That's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. So the combination is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Oh, another request for a wee bit of a deep dive. Right then. Let's get ourselves settled in for a wee deep dive. I'd like to see a deep dive on AlbiHub, a peek under the hood and some explanations of what the user-friendly UI is actually hiding from a node operator.

Maybe include some discussion on ongoing channels and the why behind the limited number of LSP's offered through Al-BHub UI. How does AlbiHub impact decentralization of the network? And discussions of cloud versus self-hosted AlbiHub instances. Great. Ed, that's a pretty solid suggestion. Maybe true, yeah. You and I should like do a Twib special or something on that. Because I think that's probably where that would, this week in Bitcoin is probably the place for that.

And that is a great series of questions, and there's a lot of great answers there. Very, very, very excited about the AlbiHub project. But there is good questions. Like, why is there only so many LSPs in there? Why don't they have more? Those are great questions, Ed. And Wes and I will have a conversation about maybe doing a special on this week in Bitcoin for that. Thank you for the boost.

Thank you, everybody who boosted in. We had a good amount of you stream them sats as you listen to the show. That's always just super cool. We'd love to see that. Collectively, you stacked 40,800, 7,000. Sats, hey, not bad. Thank you very much, Satt streamers. When you combine that with our boosters, it's a humble amount, but after last week, that's kind of to be expected. We stocked a collective 147,250 sets. Thank you, everyone who supports the show with a boost. When you boost this show,

it's split amongst the hosts and our editor Drew as well as the podcast app creator and the podcast index. It's all right there in the RSS feed for anyone to see. The contract itself is open source. that's really powerful. Plus, it gives the app creator a way to monetize that doesn't require creepy ads and tracking and stuff like that. It's really a powerful system. So you can start with Fountain FM. They make it really easy.

You hear us talk about Albi Hub. That's a self-hosted system that you can load up yourself and then connect to lots of different applications. It's all really fun, too. It's a very educational experience. And when you get on the boost, it really feels like you're the next level of interaction. You know, we're responding to you.

You're responding to us. It's really great. And, of course, thank you to our members who said it and forget it. We very much appreciate the members as well. All right, we got two picks for you before we get out of here. And the first one is a launcher that lets you launch your apps by casting spells. Yeah, I know how you like launchers. You're a big launcher guy.

Big launch guy. Have you ever thought about using gestures to launch things? You know, I've played with this for a hot moment in, like, Firefox, I think, and stuff, like every now and then. And it is really useful. It sounds cheesy, but if you already have your hand on the mouse, why not just do a squiggly to launch something like your terminal really quick? I don't think it takes away from having a keyboard-based launching system, like Keybinds or a launcher. No, have them both. Have them both.

No, okay. So then you might like execute. It's a Go app. It's a gesture-based launcher for Wayland. And, yeah, you run on the command. You can run the command line, ask it to learn, then you draw your gesture three times, and then after that, you're good to go.

So they kind of recommend you bind it to a key binding maybe or something when you want to trigger it, and then you can draw whatever gesture you want. You're missing the best part. Poof, magic. It has a magic wand sort of almost comp is style effect. Oh, yeah, right. So it turns your cursor into like a sparkly trailing,

magic wand. Yeah, so that's there. But it's, I don't know, it also does like a lighting effect. It's pretty solid, actually. Yeah, the UI makes it seem quite charming, and so I kind of want to start using it just for that. Yeah. All right, we'll put a link to...

This might actually especially work well if you were using it on something like a touchscreen. I don't know. Oh, of course. Hexacute. GPL3. Okay, then let's talk about Lenspect. This got some attention this week

because no one's really made a malware vulnerability scanner for Linux in a while, and Lenspect is a modern GTK-based application that does just that. If this is something you're concerned about, it is a lightweight security threat scanner powered by VirusTotal. VirusTotal is a free service for individuals. They have a paid program for businesses. They kind of aggregate a bunch of different virus database information and then give applications one place to sort of look at aggregate information. This ties in. You go over there, create an account, get an API. this ties in with that, and now you can scan individual files and folders on your system

for all known malware. And because it's using the virus total back end, it's all currently up to date, which is nice, right? You don't even have to go, like, update your database. So, Lenspect, and it's interesting to see this project, right? This is something that's been in the works for a little bit, not a topic we cover a lot on the show, but the group decided to release this as GPL3 and use the most modern GTK elements and designs they could. Yeah, you kind of like to see that.

I mean, whether or not you are a particular in need or a user of this kind of thing, want to get the API key and all that. Some people do, and they want to do it on Linux. So if this enables that kind of workflow to happen, great. And they're distributing it as a flat pack, so it's pretty easy to get going. That scanning file logo kind of looks like the Bitwarden logo, but it's okay. And maybe it's not. And it looks like a really nice clean app, and it gives you great information,

and then you can export that scan summary. Could be a way to, you know, maybe say you're doing compliance, I don't know. Or if you download something weird, this actually is... Maybe we use it every time, like, after Brent's at the studio and then he's left the studio. That's big brain. That's big brain. Got to get rid of the bug field, right? Actually, you know where this would be useful is if your kids are downloading, like, Minecraft mods or whatever crap it is,

you could check this first, make sure there's nothing weird in there. And it is GPL3, at least for the front end stuff. so it's not too risky to get into it. Yeah, set up a gesture to launch it. Yeah, set up a gesture, sure. Then you'd use Hexecute to start Lenspect. Uh-huh. You're welcome.

Now, can you give them a pro tip on maybe some advanced features that we have here in this here podcast that they might not know about? Oh, yes, we do. Well, first up is the magic of cloud chapters. Yeah, dynamic. You just pull them down from the cloud, and suddenly you can jump around in the episode. So jump right to the content you want, skip the stuff, you don't. We do have baked in chapters if you don't have a podcasting, you do a client.

Yeah, that's right. But the nice thing about the cloud chapters is we can make corrections after the fact and stuff. And then your client automatically gets the update. There's that. So that's the chapters. But if you want more detail. I might, Wes. You might.

We have transcripts. Oh, really? And a lot of clients these days, you can even play it in sync, follow along, look at the transcript as you're listening to Ossiac in your ears. That's right. And for the clients to support it, we even have diarization because we are just that fancy. And some of those, like the new podcasting apps, they also support live stream. So you can join us every Sunday at our regular bat time. See you next week.

Same bat time. Same bat station. Yeah, join us on a Tuesday that's actually a Sunday. Sunday at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern over at jb.live.tv. Or if you've got an icecast stream or plug into jbblive.fm. And we're generally sending out video streams to things like YouTube and whatnot for the live stream as well. Links to everything we talked about today are at Linuxunplugged.com, unplugged.com, sorry, slash 637.

And of course, you can send us a contact or a boost to support the show, and our membership link is over there as well. Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of Your Unplugged Program. We'll see you back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday. I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be. You know, I don't know.