30: Automation Entropy Factor

Chris gets left out in the cold after a Home Assistant glitch, and Alex puts a big batch of USB hard drives to the test

Plus a great pick for you pack rats, feedback, and more.

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• CloudFree.shop: CloudFree Smart Plug – Runs Tasmota for $9. Use code SELFHOSTED and support the show. Promo Code: SELFHOSTED
• A Cloud Guru: Demystify the sometimes difficult and deep topic of systemd, the most widely used service management scheme in Linux today.
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Links:

• Amazon price tracker
• Google study on disk temps — A 2007 study by Google showed the reverse to be true. Hard drives with average temperatures below 27 °C had a failure rate worse than hard drives with the highest reported average temperature of 50 °C, and a failure rate at least twice as high as the optimum temperature range of 37 °C to 46 °C.
• New Hard Drive Rituals — It is for these reasons that I now religiously do not commit any data to a drive until it has undergone at least one full cycle using a tool called badblocks
• selfhostedshow/infra: Infrastructure as Code
• Using 'sun' as condition fails to allow automation to trigger. — I've been using the Automation UI from the web to create the automation's and so for the conditoin I selected "Sun" and then 'after sunset' and 'before sunrise' but the automation stopped working. I had to use a 'state' condition and use 'sun.sun' and use the state 'below_horizon'
• NFS Auto Mount with systemd — Network mount units automatically acquire After dependencies on remote-fs-pre.target, network.target and network-online.target, and gain a Before dependency on remote-fs.target unless nofail mount option is set.
• Auto-mounting network file systems with systemd
• 30mm On-Metal NFC Tag – CloudFree — These blank 30mm circular NFC tags can be written to and read from using the Home Assistant app on NFC-compatible phones.
• ESXi on Raspberry Pi — Getting ESXi up and running on one of the Pis was relatively easy but there are a few gotchas.
• ESXi Arm Edition - Download
• Some history behind getting ESXi-Arm onto the Pi
• Archivy is a self-hosted knowledge repository that allows you to safely preserve useful content that contributes to your knowledge bank. — Archivy is a self-hosted knowledge repository that allows you to safely preserve useful content that contributes to your knowledge bank.
• How fast are your disks? Find out the open source way, with fio — The most reliable way to test disks is down-and-dirty, on the command line.