Have you never lost your password device (phone, laptop, etc) suddenly and unexpectedly? That’s when you really want that file synced somewhere else. But then it’s too late. Bonus on many password vault servers is shared folders, so one can share their garage door code with the family but keep the bank account details to oneself.

Those are kinda what I mentioned originally. The first is for roller shades, the second for curtains. They’re good at what they do, but that’s not blinds.

I’m fine with them being battery powered. The nice thing about having a window right there is that it can have a small solar panel up high to recharge if needed.

I’ve got several sensors and even a deadbolt that run on battery, and they go for over a year before needing a replacement.

Does your August lock allow multiple codes? I’ve got a Quickset keypad deadbolt that does, and that allowed me to set a code I gave my neighbor, and the lock reports which code was used. If yours does something similar, you can give kiddo a separate code, then when that code gets used after school, the house does the needful. No key to lose or tag to track that way.

If you’re willing to go that route, check out Zabbix and Icinga2 as well. They’re compatible with Nagios checks but the user interface is better.

I use ssmtp as well for a simple sendmail replacement. It takes over the sendmail command, doesn’t open any ports. You configure it for the domain you want and tell it what server to send everything to and it works.

True, but SQLite is not recommended in production settings, and is quite often the source of Nextcloud slowdowns, in my experience. A dedicated DB is the first thing I recommend for a production Nextcloud instance.

Oh and to be clear, in this instance, “production” means “people depend on this”, be that your family group, team/department, fraternal order, church group, etc. as opposed to “I’m just playing with this thing.”

This is how my partner and I do our notifications. We’ve got “him”, “her”, and “us”, depending on who needs the notification. Whenever either of us gets a new device, I add it to either of our groups and then works.

From what I’ve seen from running it the last year or so, yes, most Z2M releases add/change a large number of things. I use the Docker container, and I backup my mapped data directory between releases, but I have had no release related issues. Sometimes new items or features appear in Homeassistant, but it has always worked for me.

‘dd’ works, but I prefer ‘shred’. It does a DoD multi-pass shred by default, so I usually use ‘shred -vn1z /dev/(drive)’. That gives output, does a one-pass random write followed by one-pass zero of the disk. More than that just wastes time, and this kinda thing takes hours on large spinners. I also use ‘smartmontools’ to run SMART tests against my drives regularly to check their health.

A named volume for the config directory for one.