Matt Gerega

Author: Matt

  • Replacing ISY with Home Assistant – Part 3 – Movin’ In!

    This is the continuation of a short series on transitioning away from the ISY using Home Assistant. Having successfully gotten my new Home Assistant instance running, move in day was upon me. I did not have a set plan, but things were pretty simple. But first, HACS The Home Assistant Community Store (HACS) is a…

  • Replacing ISY with Home Assistant – Part 2 – A New Home

    This is the continuation of a short series on transitioning away from the ISY using Home Assistant. Getting Started, again As I mentioned in my previous post, my plan is to run my new instance of Home Assistant in parallel with my old instance and transfer functionality in pieces. This should allow me to minimize…

  • Replacing ISY with Home Assistant – Part 1a – Transition Planning

    This is the continuation of a short series on transitioning away from the ISY using Home Assistant. The Experiment I mentioned in my previous post that I had ordered some parts to run an experiment with my PowerLinc Modem (PLM). I needed to determine that I could use my existing PLM (an Insteon 2413S, which…

  • Replacing ISY with Home Assistant – Part 1 – Preparation

    This will hopefully be a short series on migrating away from my ancient ISY994. They killed it! I have had an ISY994 since early 2018, and it has served me well. It is the core communicator with my Insteon and Z-Wave devices. However, Universal Devices is killing it in favor of their eisy device. Now,…

  • Tech Tip – Not all certificates are the same

    I have been trying to build a model in Azure to start modernizing one of our applications. Part of that is configuring an application gateway correctly and getting end-to-end SSL configured. As it turns out, not all certificates are good certificates, at least to Azure. Uploading the Cert I have a wildcard certificate for a…

  • You can’t trust anyone…

    Did I “hack” a major online website. You could call it that. If using the browser’s built-in developer tools to change an element id so that I could submit my order… well, then, yes. I “hacked” the site so I could buy something…. “Refresh your cache” and other tall tales I was helping someone I…

  • When browsers have a mind of their own…

    I recently implemented Cloudflare on my domains to allow me some protection on my domains. There were some unintended side effects, and it seems to have to do with my browser’s DNS. Internal Site Management All of my mattgerega.com and mattgerega.org sites are available outside of my network, so putting Cloudflare in front as a…

  • Collecting WCF Telemetry with Application Insights

    I got pulled back in to diagnosing performance issues on an old friend, and it lead me into some dead code with a chance for resuscitation. Trouble with the WCF One of our applications has a set of WCF Services that serve the client. We had not instrumented them manually for performance metrics, although we…

  • Aging into fun

    It is obvious that my posts have been, well, tech-centric for the better part of the last year. I do my best to not post specifics about my kids because, well, their life is theirs to live, not mine to post. But I have to credit them with introducing me to an activity that keeps…

  • Maturing my Grafana setup

    I may have lost some dashboards and configuration recently, and it got me thinking about how to mature my Grafana setup for better persistence. Initial Setup When I first got Grafana running, it was based on the packaged Grafana Helm chart. As such, my Grafana instance was using SQLite database file stored in the persistent…