As far as “just works” get something that is directly integrated with home assistant and IMO if home assistant has direct access to the radio or method of communication, the better. As others have said both Zigbee and ZWave devices can interact directly with HA using a dongle and I do so with a VM on Proxmox and it works great, I do however think the ZWave JS and ZWave JS UI integrations are far and ahead of Zigbee ZHA integration (I won’t speak on Zigbee2MQTT as I don’t use it)

Wi-Fi devices are nifty but their reliance on the strength of your WiFI, internet connectivity, DHCP working, IPv6 support make them more variable than the ZWave and Zigbee standards that really just require you build a good mesh by having devices every so often that each other can “relay” through.

The problem with these older units is that we have come so far in terms of performance per watt that the cost of electricity quickly makes them irrelevant.

I used to run a cluster of Dell 710s that I was able to replace with a few M720q very cheaply off eBay and run the same workloads at less than 1/3 the power usage (even better at idle, since that really where these old units don’t do well).

I have seen a few converted into DAS or drawers for a rack, but you’d have to already have a rack for that to be useful or worthwhile.

That’s a great idea I didn’t think to check into, I’ll have to see how difficult that is to implement. I’m still pretty new to ansible.

Agreed, I was glad when they added maintenance windows because I can’t tell you the number of times I blew up my phone with notifications after rebooting a docker host and forgetting to stop the kuma instance.

Welcome, doing the same myself. I wasn’t much of a contributor prior to the great migration and I’m trying to step up my contributions in order to help grow things.

Personally my entry into Home Assistant and Smarthome was to fix a very strange series of light switches in my house that all turned on or off different lights in 1 area and I used a series of smart switches, smart bulbs and lighting groups to make them all controlled as if they were on circuit, as the cost to do so electrically was prohibitive.

Now my automations are mostly to check on the state of the house and report problems. Such as if the door to the laundry room is left closed too long (as the litterbox is in there) and to check on the state of battery powered devices to see if batteries need replaced.

I try to keep the automations simple and unobtrusive.

I have been using a variety of Zooz switches going on 2 years now. The earlier 20 series switches were personally my favorite since the they have a very distinct click and the new 70 series are softer.

As far as reliability they’ve actually been perfect in talking to both a Nortek Combo dongle and the new Zooz 800 series stick directly on home assistant. Now there are a few caveats:

1. I’ve had terrible luck with Zooz Relays, I cannot keep the things in sync with HA and I’ve been too busy to troubleshoot it further. I can’t recommend these at this time.

2. Zooz dimmers can be picky about the LED bulbs you use, I would advise avoiding dimmers or only getting 1 dimmer to test the bulbs you plan on using. You may get bulbs that are “dimmable” but then end up flickering regardless of being “anti flicker”, and the lowest sim setting IMO isn’t that dim. The only bulbs I have that work well were a clearance bulb from a local hardware store and they no longer stock them so if I end up replacing them in the future I may swap from Dimmers to Smart Bulbs + Smart Switches

3. I had one that was DOA but Zooz support sent a replacement in just a couple of days, so support was reasonable.

To me this sounds like you’re missing another service to monitor your internet for uptime. I recommend Uptime-Kuma.

JK. Best part of the self hosted media server is I can usually get away with updating and rebooting the firewall while the wife is watching her shows and she’s never the wiser!