Fyi there ar multiple standards for Poe with different voltages and some Poe switches only does one or maybe two standards (most often at 48-57 V) but if you have older/cheaper Poe devices they might use passive Poe at 24-38V and not all switches supports that mode simultaneously with the more modern Poe standards. Some switches will “support” both modes but only one mode at the time for all ports or maybe its just pasively passing on the input voltage as output voltage. Luckily most Poe switches support auto detection (unless its a crappy no name brand) and having that feature will protect your non Poe devices from damage. Poe is detected by some specific resistance steps on the wires (don’t quote me) but this means if you have very long wires auto detection might not work but that will always default to off. You can usually on a proper brand switch force a port to be on but then be sure to physically mark that port with a sticker or something saying it’s “HOT” because then there’s no protection for non Poe devices any longer.

I won’t recommend any switch for you at the moment untill I know more about your skill level and use case.

I think we are getting too off topic here so maybe make a seperate post in here asking how to tinker with selfhosting, dns, tinkering etc and you can have multiple people’s inputs.

It can be a good idea to mentatlly seperate your router needs with you 2.5G speeds and WiFi needs, they dont have to live on the same device. For you private lan you need a router so you can hide and control your devices behind NAT and firewall. For that I’d just recommended one of the small hap or hax devices that suits your needs for routing, and/or wifi. If you want to be fancy the RB9005U could maybe work with your switching need as well.

You don’t need Vlan. I believe it is not what you think it is. Vlan is if you want to segregated your own lan int to different independent lans with various firewall rules.

All you need for your dorm is NAT. But for the love of god make sure that you dont connect your lan with the dorm lan or your DHCP server will start handing out IP’s to everyone else in your dorm and it will crash the dorm router. The ethernet jack in the wall of your dorm (I assume that’s how it works for you) needs to go to the WAN port of the router. But bare in mind on mikrotik you can configure the WAN port to be any physical port you want, but with default config it is port 1.

I have done this before as well when living in a dorm where wifi was shit so i did my own little setup in my room so I could stream to Crome cast etc on my own trusted lan. Get a small router with support for wire Guard vpn (i love mikrotik for this) and you have an easy way to tunnel out for all your devices.

What’s on my USB stick you ask… A bunch of random shit I haven’t touched for 8 years so I have no idea what it is and it’s probably outdated, but I’d be damned if that usb stick is not In my keychain because “I might need it one day”

Here’s an idea. Use a mikrotik router board. They are super cheap and support VPN natively. I use wireguard but it should also support openVPN as well. Maybe more I’m not sure. The small hap series are super cheap and works great.

Mikrotik all the way. But prepare yourself for a nice steep learning curve, but now that om past that i sware by it. Super fast and infinity configurable. The entire router configuration can be exported as a txt file and imported in seconds so if it breaks just get a new one and load up your config and you are good to go. Also the forums are a gold mine of information. What i love the most is just how fast it is. Setting take effect instantly. Also means it is extremely fast to lock yourself out of not careful. Again, steep learning curve but really good after that.

I used this for a project once and its great. Super powerful and has a great API for automation https://kanboard.org/

Possible: yes

Recommend: absolutely not

My best advice is to NOT think of it as addons. If you want grafana or node red for example, just install them in seperate in a container not considering anything else about HA. Then just use them normally. You can still use the integrations for grafana and node red. Integrations work perfectly fine on HA in a Docker container.

Remember, very important: INTEGRATIONS ARE NOT ADDONS they are two very different things.

I can see that quickly becoming an issue if people just run random yaml files without understanding the underlying functions. I’m happy I never took that route because I leaned so much

Hmm I should maybe have added that I only ever touched docker cli tools and have never used a front end of any kind. I do know that they exists, but I like having my fingers in the mechanical room so to speak so it gave me a quite steep learning curve writing my own docker compose files from scratch and learning the syntax, environment variables and volumes working manually. I still to this day only use cli version of Docker because its the only thing I ever learned.

Came here to write exactly this. It’s a steep learning curve but well worthwhile. Although I’d specify and say: learn docker compose.

Edit: what I ment was learn docker cli tools (command line tools) and use Docker compose that way. It gives you a much better understanding of how Docker actually works behind the scene while still keeping it high level

Do you have anything more to back up the claims about haos breaking privacy other than sone DNS queries? Just because there is a DNS query doesn’t mean any actual data is being sent. I’m only asking because I’d be sad to hear if there are really issues. HA is fully open source so I’m surprised if this is really and issue.

I can also add that if you want to run multiple programs that each have a web interface it’s easy to direct each interface to the port you want instead of having to go through various config files that are different for each program or worst case having to change a hardcoded port in some software. With docker you have the same easy config options for each service you want to run. Same with storage paths. Various software stores their files at seemingly random places. With docker you just map a folder and all you files are stored there without any further configs.

Addons on HAOS are just Docker containers. When you use HA in Docker you have to just install the addons you like yourself as containers next to HA. It gives you more freedom to change settings for the “addons” when you install them yourself, but it is also a little more work. I think it is still worth it because you can also just install whatever you want. I run a minecraft server for example on the same server.

Thank you. It was mostly ment as a joke tho. I’m not actually afraid to ask, but more ignorant because it’s all behind VPN and that’s just so much easier and safer and I know how to do it so less effort. Https is just magic for me at the moment and I like it that way. Maybe one day I’ll learn the magic spells but not today.

Everything is behind a wireguard vpn for me. It’s mostly because I don’t understand how to set up Https and at this point I’m afraid to ask so everything is just http.

Linus tech tips recently made huge pc build guide video that you might benefit from watching.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BL4DCEp7blY&pp=ygUbbGludXMgdGVjaCB0aXBzIGJ1aWxkIGd1aWRl

I have a raspberry pi with a cheap 5TB usb drive at my parents house that boots up once a week and pulls a backup. I use rsnapshot to create incremental updates that takes up every little space and is easy to manage. I have the drive accessible with smb should I ever need to pull a copy from there. It’s super slow but that doesn’t matter for an off-site backup and it is super cheap

Edit: I should maybe add for future readers that cheap does not mean cheap quality but cheap relative to the amount af TB you get per dollar. I use a WD shingled drive wich is quality drive but cheap and slow af. But it doesnt matter because the internet connection is the bottleneck anyway.