Ubiquiti unifi Protect makes it very easy. Buy a unifi protect doorbell and cloud key gen2+ (your network video recorder).

E-waste

Everything at my house has a TLD named after the road I live on (a founding father last name). Everything at my offsite at my dads house uses TLD named after the road he lives on (a woman’s first name).

It’s both arbitrary and practical. A number systems exist at both such as proxmox. truenas. pihole. plex. So it’s a good way to tell them appart without having to differentiate them in the domain name.

R710 is e-waste. Try to get at least like a r730 with ddr4 ram. An r720 is still usable, but getting long in the tooth and only ddr3.

The hardware controller bit is something i do. So I run Proxmox. I think you can do it in Esxi, but proxmox might be worth at least looking into. Plex is in a VM and TrueNAS is in a VM. My SSDs attached to my motherboard have my OS and VMs. My nas drives are connected to an HBA PCIe card. In my case that’s a Dell H740 but a H310 is good to if you need to buy one. They are like $30. The HBA card connects either to a Backplane for hot swap drives or you can get sas to 4x sata breakout cables. All of your NAS drives, probably rust spinners, would connect to the HBA card. In Proxmox we can configure to give the HBA card to the TrueNAS VM so the virtual machine has direct control over the physical PCIe card. This is called PCIe Passthrough. In this configuration Proxmox does not have control over the HBA card hence why the OS drives can’t be connected to it as any drives connected to the HBA card are also controlled by the VM the HBA is passed through to. Once in TrueNAS shares can be setup be it for personal files or Plex media. This give you best of both worlds between having 1 server to do everything and being able to run TrueNAS with physical hardware access.

Batteries are bad. Can be replaced, but getting into a rackmount UPS is nice too.

Lol. 236 days and 107 days since the last reboots of my two servers.

A while back a bought a UNVR-PRO second hand and the idiot seller shipped it in a 1U Unifi network switch box with a few scraps of cardboard but plenty of room to bounce around. I was vocal about how terrible the packaging was, but ultimately ended up keeping it as somehow there were no signs of damage. Fast forward almost a year and the device bricked up. Was investigating the issue by asking questions on the Ubiquiti Discord and a UI employee reached out and told me to RMA it. Told me to hang onto it until they had one to ship out. Had to wait about a month and they sent me a new one, but never asked for the old one back. Sat on the broken one for a few months. Opened it up but there wasn’t anything obviously broken, took some photos, and put it on ebay for parts. Couldn’t believe how fast it sold. So while my initial packaging experience was terrible it worked out to me owing a UNVR-PRO for a net investment of about $150. Can’t complain too much.

At the bare minimum, or at least to start get data in a raid that losing a drive or 2 won’t cause you to lose everything. You’re not out of the yet. If you can’t lose your files you want 2 separate copies in different machines, preferably at different locations. Be that a cloud service or a remote server.

My files are on my local NAS server that are also backed up to my remote NAS server at my dad’s house over a VPN. Essential files (not my plex media) are also in a 1tb cloud service. 3-2-1 backup plan is probably ideal but I’m pretty happy with my 2.5-2.5-1.5 approach 😅. 3-3-2 for critical stuff and 2-2-1 for everything else.

Doing this with Home Assistant wouldn’t be too bad.

There is a Matter Integration for Home Assistant in Beta (Matter itself is more or less in Beta)

There really isn’t a debate. You don’t want cloud devices. What do you mean by local network? That would include your wifi. Maybe you’re talking about zigbee/wave. That would be the alternative to wifi. If I went wifi but if I did it over again i would probably look more into zigbee.

Seriously don’t make your home cloud dependant. Your actions will be slow and you’re screwed if your internet goes down.

r/homeassistant is the way to go

What do you have now? I’m guessing it’s cloud based and I won’t be at all surprised by your issue. Need a local solution.

I do this with smart switches flashed with ESPhome and Home assistant manages the connection between them

If you have outside cameras then i recommend LIFX Nightvision bulbs that have built in IR. IR helps my cams see better and when the cams detect people or cars they have my bulbs switch on visable light.