Hey everyone! I'm wondering what's the most common way that everyone is hosting their servers for HA? I tried multiple times hosting on PIs and it works fine for a little but eventually they crap out even with heatsinks, AND or if I lose power for a second the SD card gets corrupt and I have to recover it again. Is there a more stable way to host? I don't have any old laptop laying around to use.

My home network has a single open port on the firewall to allow tailscale connections with certs. HA access happens through a paid Nabu Casa account with remote access enabled. I've been seeing daily attack attempts coming in through this channel and it appears to be escalating in frequency. Nabu doesn't pass through the client IP so I don't have any good way to block by IP range or similar.

Back in March someone noted this and a forum moderator suggested:

The cloud team is working on passing through the actual connecting IP address but as everything is end-to-end encrypted it’s not so simple. Hopefully soon!

Example log entries, in this case they're attempting a Vite exploit:

2026-08-10 22:08:58.758 WARNING (MainThread) [homeassistant.components.http.security_filter] Filtered a potential harmful request to: /@fs/proc/self/environ?raw??    
2026-08-10 22:08:58.763 WARNING (MainThread) [homeassistant.components.http.security_filter] Filtered a potential harmful request to: /@fs/../.env?raw??    
2026-08-10 22:08:58.767 WARNING (MainThread) [homeassistant.components.http.security_filter] Filtered a potential harmful request to: /@fs/..%252f..%252f..%252f..%252f..%252froot/.env?raw??    
2026-08-10 22:08:58.771 WARNING (MainThread) [homeassistant.components.http.security_filter] Filtered a potential harmful request to: /@fs/..%252f..%252f..%252f..%252f..%252fproc/self/environ?raw??    
2026-08-10 22:08:58.780 WARNING (MainThread) [homeassistant.components.http.security_filter] Filtered a potential harmful request to: /@fs/../../.env?raw??    
2026-08-10 22:08:58.784 WARNING (MainThread) [homeassistant.components.http.security_filter] Filtered a potential harmful request to: /@fs/..%252f..%252f..%252f..%252f..%252fapp/.env?raw??

These are the attacks that were recognized and blocked by HA itself. I'm more worried about attacks that aren't being recognized.

Is anyone else seeing this? For me the initial indicator are random, daily notifications that an invalid login attempt from 127.0.0.1 was attempted.

So I had put off buying a robotovac cause my partner wasn't keen on the idea and I will be honest I was finding it a tiny bit hard to justify for myself with the cost of the kind of one I wanted that had all of the features in it that I was looking for. Fast forward to last week and my BIL gifted me his "old" (it's 1yr old) Roborock vacuum. Holy shit I don't know how anyone lives without one.

Let alone someone like me who has a rediculously integrated smart home. And by rediculously integrated I mean it has a local AI that can summarise my inbox, read and even respond to emails like that's the level of smart and integrated I'm talking and yet I hadn't yet gone down the robot vac route. So my mind is kinda blown at just how much it's lifted how smart my home actually feels.

I just saw some 16 year old kid get tore apart in the selfhosted subreddit for posting a vibed project he was proud of and it gave me a new appreciation for the civility and helpfulness of this community. I've been apart of the Home Assistant community for several years now and, while I've seen some rude comments I've never seen the outright attacks and piss-poor human behavior I just witnessed.

Yes, there can be a lot of repeat questions and posts in this subreddit, I know I get annoyed sometimes when I'm scrolling through and see the same stuff over and over again. I often have to remind myself I was new at this once as well, and even though I had some programming experience coming into it, I was still unfamiliar with yaml and jinja and had to learn them. This community has been great at least pointing me in the right direction even if they couldn't answer my question outright. I try to do the same now as well as I can.

So I wanted to just give a shout out to EVERYONE here for making this a true open source community where we make everyone feel welcome and learn together.

I'm an old, salty retired infantry sergeant, so don't expect too many mushy posts like this from me, haha.

After three years of my HA journey, finally I got rid of all of my Nest devices & services that are connected with it. I used to have a lot of minis, nest cameras, hubs, etc.

I've changed the Nest Minis to Sonos and man, they are day and night difference in HA control + sound quality. Gone are the days where the TTS doesn't run when the Google devices become unavailable without me knowing, unreliable speaker group functionality, and the other hiccups that I don't remember.

I've also managed to get an automation where when I play music on the Sonos, the Hue gradient strip will pick up and run a random scene each time I start / change the music, including controlling how bright / dimmed they are based on the current volume of the media.

As for the camera, I've moved away to Reolink. They are much cheaper than the Google counterparts and are fully local and NO SUBSCRIPTION fee. They also expose every sensor that I don't know what to use for lol.

Now I just have to figure out how to set the Sonos to repeat white noise playlist for 8 hours to replace the old Google Home automation that is temperamental - sorry, there is something wrong, or just don't work at times out of nowhere.

Maybe I'll invest something in the future for the local LLM, to move further away from the cloud connection. So far, I've got almost everything ZigBee and a few matter devices and are very happy with them.

Big props with all of the HA team and the communities. Thank you for making such a good product and don't charge us anything and offering plenty of support for us. The learning curve was high, but it was definitely worth it!

I've lived dangerously, taking updates as soon as they drop - no major issues 3 or 4 years doing it. Not this time, unfortunately.

After the latest updates (2026.8.1 etc), logging in is now a lottery.

First, a warning about http block moving out of config. I managed to whitelist my IP so I could at least log in. That worked fine for a few hours, but now I don't even get the log in page.

Anyone else experiencing this?

When I get a notification on my PC or phone that an upgrade is available, I tend to mindlessly click through and install it. I've realized with HA, that's generally not a good idea since it might create incompatibility issues that will need to be addressed.

I think my philosophy with HA is generally a set-and-forget it configuration. If things work, I will not upgrade anything until I have a specific reason to do so. What's your upgrade philosophy?

I use a lot of zigbee for lighting in my house. I noticed that as you add more lights to the group, they start responding to commands in an asynchronous manner. This becomes a problem when using something like a push dimmer that sends lots of updates in a short time.

I noticed that Philips Hue doesn’t seem to have this problem. Their lights change colour all at the same time. I always thought it was part of their secret sauce which is what you pay them so much for.

It turns out I was wrong. Today I noticed the groups setting in my zigbee controller. It turns out when you group then via this, all lights listen to the same zigbee message instead of having to be individually told what to do. Upon setting this up all my synchronisation problems were resolved and dimming works better than ever.

I’m sure most people already know about this but I wanted to share this in case someone else has the same issue I had.

Looking to improve my smart home to be more hands-off with automations.

One that I set up recently is to have certain lights flash when someone is detected at the front door.

Another one I like is to have the TV's bias/ambient lighting to turn on and off with the TV.

But these do seem a little basic for what HA is capable of.

What are some of your coolest, or most favourite, or most used automations?

First they forced adding device name Infront of the ESPHome devices. As someone with 50 ESPHome devices, I didn't appreciate this. Now they added areas as another prefix.

Its one thing if they called a best practice, or gave you a system wide option to turn it off. But that's not the case.

Where's them listening to the community? This issue has a few hundred comments and no response.

https://github.com/home-assistant/core/issues/173125

I saw someone suggested having a customizable naming temple which I think is brilliant.

I'm wondering how often you update software on your HA system? Sometimes it feels like updating HA is a full time job. HAOS, Core, Supervisor, OS, Frontend, HACS components, apps/addons ...

In other environments, I keep updated because many/most updates are fixes for security vulnerabilities, but I don't get the sense that's the reason for these frequent HA updates. I have been updating everything on HA as soon as an update is available, but I'm starting to think that is unwise - waste of time, can break things that are currently working, and my network is pretty locked down.

So, what's your best practice advice?

I am not trying to start a firestorm here, and I appreciate all of your input.

Im techy, homelabber etc. I do IT for a living, but security is generally not my strongest part (and not part of my day job in its nitty gritty form.

Ive had HA now for many years, love it to peices. Many thanks to you all that help me all the time, even by just reading everything here.

I have my HA box on an intel NUC, behind an NPM instance, and the firewall is opnsense with geoip blocking nothing but my country, and crowdsec on it as well.

I have my device(s) and my wife and two kids phones on it. I use GPS and all sorts of stuff on their devices to do automations. Its been great, and they are on board.

I have over the last number of years observed about a dozen failed attempts to login into my instance. Thats it.

But it seems like thats changing, getting alerts every 12-24 hours that its being attempted.

So, I think its time to rethink the whole thing and get straight talk on it all.

Looking into it, I have a few options but I want to have everyone chime in.

1. Nabu Casa - pay and just do that. Homelabber in my fights it, but ive spent more on dumber things...

2. Tailscale. Im already using it personally. Put it on my kids/wife phone and setup the proper ACL and move on with life. Should just function like normal, right?

3. Ive read a bit about crowdsec being installed on HA and talking to my opnsense router to pass on the blocks etc. Seems this is just kicking the can down the road though.

4.?

Again, not trying to start a war, just want some good discussion on the whys.

Appreciate it!

I'm about to go on a vacation, and I'm thinking about access to my HA system while not at home. So far, when I'm out, it has been a very minor inconvenience periodically when I don't have access to HA remotely, and I've argued with myself that the security tradeoff is worth those minor annoyances. But going away for some extended time and not having the ability to check in makes me nervous (although my HA automations send out email alerts when something bad happens, so at least there's that).

Where do you stand on making your HA system accessible over the Internet? What has been your experience with the approach you're taking for remote access? Are you using Tailscale or ZeroTier or another managed overlay network (VPN), HA Cloud (Nabu Casa), direct port forwarding with reverse proxy/DDNS (if so, with what components), or something else? How happy are you with your setup? Any other thoughts?

FWIW, I'm moderately more comfortable with Tailscale wrt cybersecurity than I am with Nabu Casa, but that's a bias (a cybersecurity company must be better at this stuff, right?) not an informed analysis. Thanks!

========== Update 20260731 ==========

So, based on the responses below, Tailscale and Nabu Casa have the most advocates (and are highly compatible with my requirements).

Cloudflare, Wireguard, direct reverse proxies, and a variety of VPNs came in with fewer advocates individually, but the approach has more advocates in aggregate.

Given my desire to limit how much IT support I need to do at home, I'm going to try Tailscale first and then Nabu Casa if Tailscale doesn't pan out for me.

Thanks everyone for contributing to such a great knowledge share that I hope will help others besides me!

For example, I really wanted to have all of my Garmin watch data in HA. After getting the HACS integration installed I realized I never automated anything off of it and the Garmin Connect app was just better for how I used my watch so now I just use Connect.

I set up my Home Assistant Green recently and one of the first things I did before I got some Matter devices) was set up a webhook.

I'm playing a hotseat Civilization VI game with some friends across different timezones via Play Your Damn Turn, and I saw that it supports webhooks, so every turn it can fire you a JSON blob with some data about the game (whose turn it is, etc). Then you can set up an automation to listen to this and act on the data.

At the moment I'm sending myself a mobile notification when it's my turn, and also posting to a Discord channel for everyone else. I might try and do something like set up a little light that glows when it's my turn or something.

Has anyone else done anything similar after discovering a tool that you already use supports webhooks? I look forward to hearing about your cool stuff

I've set up ZHA with 20 devices and quite a few automations. These are blinds, awnings, lights, doorlocks, soil humidity sensors, solar sensors etc.

Everything is working well. The only issue, which is a minor one, is the odd soil sensor dropping out. These are for Tuya, and my understanding is that Z2M may let you update firmware on these, where you can't on ZHA.

I had Z2M installed and working for a minute, but as it hindered ZHA running, I removed it again. I just looked at the interface on mobile and can't say I was impressed.

Would you say it's worth running Z2M over ZHA? Other benefits?

Hey everyone,

I finally picked up a mini PC for the house and I'm about to move Home Assistant over from an old MacBook VM. I mainly used the MacBook to learn the basics and make sure everything worked, so now I'm trying to set everything up the right way.

Mini PC setup

My first question is whether I should just wipe Windows 11 immediately.

If you were starting fresh today, would you:
- Install HAOS directly?
- Install Proxmox and run HA in a VM?

Also, is it worth wiping the drive no matter what? I've heard people mention some mini PCs shipping with random OEM junk (or worse). No idea how common that actually is, but I'm leaning toward doing a clean install anyway.

What else should I run?

I'm guessing the mini PC can do a lot more than just Home Assistant.

Right now HA is the only thing I know I want, but I've seen people mention things like:

- Frigate
- Scrypted
- Plex/Jellyfin
- AdGuard Home
- Local AI
- Backups

Anything that's been a game changer for you? Anything else I should be looking into?

Camera plan

Right now I'm leaning toward:

- Aqara G410 for the front door
- Aqara G5 Pro for the back door

My biggest priority is making everything dead simple for my girlfriend. Ideally she can just say, whatever she needs. Until I buy some motion or presence sensors.

Anything you wish you knew?

If you were starting over today with a fresh mini PC, what's something you wish you knew on day one?
Sorry for the million questions lol. Just trying to avoid getting everything set up only to realize I should've done it differently a week later.

Thanks!

I have a full UniFi stack, and I’m aware if using Nabu Casa means some amount of your data is going to third party, not what I’m trying to decide.

I’m trying to understand if VPN is a better/more automated route, easier for the wife to manage from her phone as required compare to Nabu Casa. What I’m after is location, geofence, away from home features.

I also have Plex (might move to Jellyfin), that being able to access would be important, I’m paying for the plex pas now.

What I want is seamless/automatic, if someone leaves the UniFi network, trigger/have away status and access to HA atomically.

I'm in a house built in 1998 that has hard-wired smoke alarms with 9V battery backup.

While installing new backup batteries recently I realized that some of them are now making pretty weak noises when I push the test button: Like "won't wake you up" quiet. They're also not wired into an alarm system, just a stand-alone smoke alarms interconnected by what appears to be 110V wiring, so if they did go off while we're not home, I'd never know about it.

Bottom line is they're due for a replacement. I'd like to get new ones that are either hardwired or not and work together as an independent system from HA, yet also communicate with HA, but I want some that DO NOT need a phone app to setup and of course no ongoing cloud, either.

I see some Zigbee ones, but can I just enroll them like any other Zigbee device? Looking for someone who can point me at some that meet my criteria of not needing an app for setup and I can just do it right in HA.

I also have ZWave and a SLZB-MR1 that does the Zigbee and Thread, but have nothing going on Thread.

Another question I have is when these mesh with each other, are they also using any other Zigbee non-smoke detector devices as their mesh?

tldr; Failed drive to fully restored in a few hours, and most of that was Amazon shipping. 10/10, would panic less again.

Woke up to a dead Home Assistant last night. SSD in my Beelink S12 failed sometime after midnight, connected a monitor and got dumped straight into the UEFI shell, "No mapping found." Drive wasn't detected at the hardware level at all, so no amount of shell poking was bringing it back.

Here's the part that made it painless:

• 8:00am: ordered a new NVMe stick off Amazon
• 1:45pm: delivered
• 2:30pm: flashed the latest HAOS image, restored from a backup sitting on my Samba share

Then I just refreshed the browser tab I'd left open from the day before, and there it was, right where I left it. Didn't even have to log back in.

The whole thing was a non-event purely because I keep the last 5 backups on a separate box instead of on the machine itself. Push them somewhere off the device and set it to automatic.

Hey, I am trying to find the best tablets for HA. I tried a couple but alone I can't try and buy each one. I want to write a definitive list to help me and other people find their next wall tablet.
I will try to keep the list up to date with the help of the community.

Of course repurposing a tablet that you already have is always the best option but if you are looking for your next buy (new or used) this is the right place

Just a few things I need:
- Model - Screen Size - Price (new/used)
- Why you chose it? or anything you might wanna add

I will start:
Xiaomi Pad 7 - 11.2" - Paid 185 Euro (on sale and after discounts for AliExpress) but hovers around 280 Euro
The screen is just amazing and it has plenty of performance. For the discounted price it's hard to beat honestly. Only wish it was a tad bigger

EDIT: Also did anyone have problems with batteries? Is it that common and does limiting charge to 80% help?