openhab-addons VS Portainer

I used open hab https://www.openhab.org/ for a while and really liked it but had trouble getting it to work with the ZigBee USB stick I bought. So I switched to home assistant and have been on that for a couple years now. Both are solid. I like HA a lot but the one down side for me is I have to pay the 5 bucks a month or whatever it is for the cloud access to control things when I'm not home. Openhab has instructions to set up your own server for remote access.

openHAB (version 3.6.0): Vendor and technology agnostic open source home automation

Here's what I did at my house. I don't control based on dew point and I only have one HVAC unit, but you could pull this off with openHAB and Venstar thermostats. Venstar was the only brand I was able to find with a local API to control the thermostat. You can set up rules in openHAB to perform what you'd like. The rule engine is powerful and flexible. I'm not gonna lie. It's probably going to be a lot of heavy lifting to get it going but it's rewarding once you've set it up.

OpenHAB (like Home Assistant; open source, need to run on own hardware)

openHAB Beta (version 3.3.2-beta): Vendor and technology agnostic open source home automation

While I don't care about the whole carbon boogeyman spectacle I do care about minimising our environmental impact as well as dependency on, well, as many external things as I can. One of those things is electrical power so I put about 14.5 kW worth of solar panels on a barn roof, connected to a 10kW hybrid inverter [2]. Since I don't like external dependencies I do not use the supplier's "cloud-based" management feature (*Fronius Solar Web* for those who care about such details) and disallow the thing access to the 'net. Instead I made my own system based around OpenHAB [1], a bunch of ESP8266 microcontrollers hooked up to things like the utility power meter (which has a handy P1/HAN port just for that purpose), a heat pump, a water heater, a small heater in the feed storage etc. The thing gets hourly electricity prices for today and tomorrow and creates a schedule to enable/disable devices based on demand, price and energy production from the inverter. Once I had everything set up it has worked fine without the need for intervention. This does not yet include the washing machine and dishwasher since these devices do not offer an easily automatised interface and because scheduling their use also depends on what we put in them and when we want them to clean those things. I just check the graphs to decide when to switch them on which works fine, no need for more automation.

Our electricity rates - both use as well as returns for power we deliver to the net - vary by the hour. Using the interface to the utility meter and the inverter I get readings every 10 seconds, the inverter also tells me the net frequency so it is easy to see whether the net is overloaded (frequency clearly below 50 Hz) or oversupplied (clearly above 50 Hz).

[1] ...but I have not yet connected a battery since a) we can sell overproduction and b) batteries are still too expensive. I expect battery prices to go down once enough used electric car batteries enter the market.

[2] https://www.openhab.org/

Openhab3 (Smarthome)

Portainer

> Any tips on the minimum hardware or VPS's needed to get a small swarm cluster setup?

From my testing, Docker Swarm is very lightweight, uses less memory than both Hashicorp Nomad and lightweight Kubernetes distros (like K3s). Most of the resource requirements will depend on what containers you actually want to run on the nodes.

You might build a cluster from a bunch of Raspberry Pis, some old OptiPlex boxes or laptops, or whatever you have laying around and it's mostly going to be okay. On a practical level, anything with 1-2 CPU cores and 4 GB of RAM will be okay for running any actually useful software, like a web server/reverse proxy, some databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL/MariaDB), as well as either something for a back end or some pre-packaged software, like Nextcloud.

So, even 5$/month VPSes are more than suitable, even from some of the more cheap hosts like Hetzner or Contabo (though the latter has a bad rep for limited/no support).

That said, you might also want to look at something like Portainer for a nice web based UI, for administering the cluster more easily, it really helps with discoverability and also gives you redeploy web hooks, to make CI easier: https://www.portainer.io/ (works for both Docker Swarm as well as Kubernetes, except the Kubernetes ingress control was a little bit clunky with Traefik instead of Nginx)

In this section, we will add Portainer to help us in managing our Docker containers. You can find more details about it here. To integrate Portainer into our EC2 project, we can follow these steps:

Git issues pointing to: https://docs.portainer.io/v/ce-2.9/start/install/agent/swarm/linux gives a ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS.

I am currently running Portainer, but webhooks (GitOps) appear to be broken ( [2.19.0] GitOps Updates not automatically polling from git · Issue #10309 · portainer/portainer · GitHub ) and so I cannot send webhook to redeploy a stack. So, looking for alternatives. Using this as a good excuse to learn more about docker and CI/CD etc.

A Synology NAS running Portainer (https://www.portainer.io/) running Paperless NGX (https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx)

This works better than I can possibly tell you.

I have an Epson WorkForce ES-580W that I bought when my mother passed away to bulk scan documents and it scans everything, double-sided if required, multi-page PDFs if required, at very high speed and uploads everything to OneDrive, at which point I drag and drop everything into Paperless.

I could, thinking about it, have the scanner email stuff to Paperless. Might investigate that today.

Paperless will OCR it and make it all searchable. This setup is amazing, I love living in the future.

> I've come to the conclusion (after trying kops, kubespray, kubeadm, kubeone, GKE, EKS) that if you're looking for < 100 node cluster, docker swarm should suffice. Easier to setup, maintain and upgrade.

Personally, I'd also consider throwing Portainer in there, which gives you both a nice way to interact with the cluster, as well as things like webhooks: https://www.portainer.io/

With something like Apache, Nginx, Caddy or something else acting as your "ingress" (taking care of TLS, reverse proxy, headers, rate limits, sometimes mTLS etc.) it's a surprisingly simple setup, at least for simple architectures.

casaos it just makes things like backups, offsite syncing and many other nas related things so much easier to manage. And gives you a proper nas like experience similar to that in which you'd fine on companies like tnas or synology. I actually also use it as a replacement for portainer when i don't need the more advanced features it offers

> I moved to docker swarm and love it. It's so much easier, straight forward, automatic ingress network and failover were all working out of the box. I'll stay with swarm for now.

I've had decent luck in the past with the K3s distribution, which is a bit cut down Kubernetes: https://k3s.io/

It also integrates nicely with Portainer (aside from occasional Traefik ingress weirdness sometimes), which I already use for Swarm and would suggest to anyone that wants a nice web based UI: https://www.portainer.io/

Others might also mention K0s, MicroK8s or others - there's lots of options there. But even so, I still run Docker Swarm for most of my private stuff as well and it's a breeze.

For my needs, it has just the right amount of abstractions: stacks with services that use networks and can have some storage in the form of volumes or bind mounts. Configuration in the form of environment variables and/or mounted files (or secrets), some deployment constraints and dependencies sometimes, some health checks and restart policies, as well as resource limits.

If I need a mail server, then I just have a container that binds to the ports (even low port numbers) that I need and configure it. If I need a web server, then I can just run Apache/Nginx/Caddy and use more or less 1:1 configuration files that I'd use when setting up either outside of containers, but with the added benefit of being able to refer to other apps by their service names (or aliases, if they have underscores in the names, which sometimes isn't liked).

At a certain scale, it's dead simple to use - no need for PVs and PVCs, no need for Ingress and Service abstractions, or lots and lots of templating that Helm charts would have (although those are nice in other ways).