Automation

Home Assistant Home · PC dashboard with Now, Needs attention, Rooms and Homelab columns: weather and indoor-outdoor temperature graphs, quick controls, line-art room tiles and home lab status

Home Assistant OS in My Home Lab: How It's Configured

A revised tour of my Home Assistant OS install: the device fleets, small but useful template sensors, e-mail and phone alerts, and a repo-managed PC and mobile dashboard suite with strict design rules.

The Homelab Console dashboard in dark mode, showing Publish and Certificates actions and a recent jobs table

A LAN-Only Web Console for My Home Lab

The scripts I used to run by hand from my desktop now live behind a small LAN-only web console. It uses passkey sign-in and a fixed list of audited actions. Claude drafts pages, and a security gate checks them before I approve anything.

Diagram of the acme.sh DNS-01 certificate automation across Cloudflare, Lets Encrypt, a local cert cache, and SSH push to internal hosts

Let's Encrypt for Internal Hosts with DNS-01 and SSH Push

How I replaced a dozen ad hoc certbot setups with one central acme.sh instance. It uses DNS-01 validation through Cloudflare and pushes each certificate to its host over SSH.

AI and the Gap Between Idea and Action

Most home-lab projects stall on friction, not ideas. An AI assistant keeps you moving from idea to a running, maintainable system, without replacing understanding.

Diagram of the anacron-scheduled rsync backup flow from workstation to Synology NAS with email reporting

Building a Resilient Linux Workstation Backup System with rsync

A resilient Linux workstation backup system using rsync over SSH to a Synology NAS, with automated scheduling, timeout protection, and email reporting.