Today, I’m going to show you how my girlfriend and I made the craziest chandelier using rope lights, some stiff wire, and elbow grease.

Now that we’ve setup our new server, created firewall rules, and created our VMs and Docker containers, it’s time for something new. HomeAssistant is a home automation platform. It’s highly modular and very actively developed. It’s opensource, and there are nerds all over the world contributing. Instead of being limited to devices that are “approved” to work with Alexa or Google Home or whatever Apple’s dumb version is called, you can get almost anything to work with HomeAssistant.

Previously, I talked about setting up the network in my new homelab. In this article I’ll briefly cover Proxmox, and how I have it setup, but mostly talk about Docker and some of the fun and neat things I do with it.

In the first segment of this new series, I gave you a quick rundown of the changes since my first home server 10 years ago. Now let’s get into the fun stuff. VLANs, reverse proxies, and firewall rules, oh my. Originally I had a Netgate SG1100 firewall. It worked fine, but eventually the hard drive failed. It was also underpowered for my new gigabit speeds. I could buy a new one, but what’s the point. I didn’t want to spend the crazy money for an enterprise level firewall. So I got a Beelink mini PC.

Roughly 10 years ago, I wrote a series of articles walking you through the process of setting up a home server. Over time, my needs changed, as did the available technology, as well as my knowledge. So in the next few articles, I’ll be writing a follow up, but it’s really starting from scratch. This specific article is more of a catch up, that fills the gaps between then and now. This will seem like it all happened at once, but this really spans years. The old articles are still accurate. Installing a system is installing a system. I just learned how to do more and new things. All of…