My journey into smart home technologies started off with a couple of Hue spots and a bridge I used with the Android app Sleep as Android (the first app I ever paid for, and I still use it today!) to wake me up every morning. Even then I was intrigued what I could do with these two spots that didn’t even have any RGB LEDs and just allowed me to change their temperature. Fast-forward a few months and I discovered the Home Assistant project in a thread on Reddit. That is when my addiction with home automation and self-hosted software started.

Ever since then, I’ve been hooked on automating every facet of my life and self-hosting as many applications as possible. First there was one Raspberry Pi which only ran Home Assistant and in the blink of an eye, there were three running various applications and services. As my list of self-hosted software grew, so did my need for computing power. The three Raspberry Pis were replaced with a server running on desktop hardware and Proxmox as its operating system.

Recently, I’ve consolidated my servers once again and have taken the hard drives out of my networked-attached storage running FreeNAS and combined them with the CPU and motherboard of my Proxmox host. Instead of FreeNAS or Proxmox, that machine is now running Unraid and I couldn’t be any happier with it.