Matt Gerega

Category: Technology

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • Literally every time I go away…

    It really truly seems like every time I go away, something funny happens in the lab and stuff goes down. That pattern continued last week. Loads of Travel A previously planned Jamaican getaway butted up against a short-notice business meeting in Austin. Since I could not get a direct flight to either location, I ended…

  • Speed. I.. am.. Speed.

    “One winner, 42 losers. I eat losers for breakfast. Breakfast? Maybe I should have had breakfast. A little brekie could be good for me….” My quest for speed lead to using 1TB of data every day…

  • Going Banana

    That’s right… just one banana. I have been looking to upgrade the Raspberry PI 3 that has been operating as home lab’s reverse proxy. While it would have been more familiar to find another Raspberry Pi 4 to use, their availability is, well, terrible. I found a workable, potentially more appropriate, solution in the Banana…

  • Speeding up Packer Hyper-V Provisioning

    I spent a considerable amount of time working through the provisioning scripts for my RKE2 nodes. Each node took between 25-30 minutes to provision. I felt like I could do better. Check the tires A quick evaluation of the process quickly made me realize that most of the time is spent in the full install…

  • A big mistake and a bit of bad luck…

    In the Home Lab, things were going good. Perhaps a little too good. A bonehead mistake on my part and hardware failure combined to make another ridiculous weekend. I am beginning to think this blog is becoming “Matt messed up again.” Permissions are a dangerous thing I wanted to install the Azure DevOps agent on…