Server setup help - Home Assistant, PiHole, Unraid

[rgbrobot]

Hello everyone. I'm kind of in an uncomfortable situation. I need some dedicated help in getting Home Assistant, Unraid, and PiHole up and running. read on for more details.

 

I wanted to have a Home Assistant setup for my workshop. I didn’t know it at the time, but that’s what I needed.

 

Through a series of conversations (and roughly $700 later) I had enough equipment to set up an Unraid server, and have two tablet computers to run my home assistant (inside unraid) and two dashboards. They're just sitting in my home office doing nothing. 

 

The person who recommended all this equipment to me was willing to help me get everything up and running, but he had a personal emergency and now isn't able to help me complete the setup. 

 

I'm super-duper green when it comes to this kind of stuff... so much so that I'm finding it hard to follow tutorials, as they seem to require a base level of understanding I don't have. I'm fairly technical, but most of my computer knowledge revolves around tinkering in the files system. I just don't have the grid for networking and custom computing.

 

This leaves me with a server that I somehow managed to get up and running properly (I think) and a home assistant VM that, while technically might also be installed correctly, I have no idea how to integrate all my devices (cameras, lights, air monitors, outlets, 3d printer). I was also trying to get Pi-Hole up and running as a VM as well tonight, but literally 1 minute into the video I was already lost. 

 

So the good news: Most of this is ready to go, I just need help in figuring out...... how to use it, I think.   Pi-Hole is the only thing that hasn't been started yet. 

 

Mods: If this is the wrong place to post this, my sincerest apologies. I'd love a tip on where to go to get assistance if the post has to come down.

[LIGISTX]

31 minutes ago, rgbrobot said:

Hello everyone. I'm kind of in an uncomfortable situation. I need some dedicated help in getting Home Assistant, Unraid, and PiHole up and running. read on for more details.

 

I wanted to have a Home Assistant setup for my workshop. I didn’t know it at the time, but that’s what I needed.

 

Through a series of conversations (and roughly $700 later) I had enough equipment to set up an Unraid server, and have two tablet computers to run my home assistant (inside unraid) and two dashboards. They're just sitting in my home office doing nothing. 

 

The person who recommended all this equipment to me was willing to help me get everything up and running, but he had a personal emergency and now isn't able to help me complete the setup. 

 

I'm super-duper green when it comes to this kind of stuff... so much so that I'm finding it hard to follow tutorials, as they seem to require a base level of understanding I don't have. I'm fairly technical, but most of my computer knowledge revolves around tinkering in the files system. I just don't have the grid for networking and custom computing.

 

This leaves me with a server that I somehow managed to get up and running properly (I think) and a home assistant VM that, while technically might also be installed correctly, I have no idea how to integrate all my devices (cameras, lights, air monitors, outlets, 3d printer). I was also trying to get Pi-Hole up and running as a VM as well tonight, but literally 1 minute into the video I was already lost. 

 

So the good news: Most of this is ready to go, I just need help in figuring out...... how to use it, I think.   Pi-Hole is the only thing that hasn't been started yet. 

 

Mods: If this is the wrong place to post this, my sincerest apologies. I'd love a tip on where to go to get assistance if the post has to come down.

Don't try and eat the elphant in 1 bite.... Get unraid working for your NAS needs, get users created, make sure all of that is happy and healthy and leave it be for a bit.

 

Then work on HA. If it is installed correctly, it should see devices on your network that have integrations for them (assuming you have devices that are out of the box HA compaitlbe), and then you can just mess around via following tutorials and watching videos to get the general idea. There are SO many videos on youtube to help with this, just watch a bunch, itll eventually make sense. The key here is... if you can never figure it out in the first place, you wouldn't ever be able to maintain any of it anyways. So if you never put the time in to really learn it, as soon as anything goes wrong (which it will.... many times, thats how homelabbing goes), as soon as you encounter this, its all for nothing anyways.

 

Pihole should be pretty simple as well, but again, don't try and do it all at once. This is the type of hobby that is a slow roll. I have had a home server for almost a decde now (2015), it took me 2 years of having truenas run baremetal to virtualize it, then took another few years to do much beyond just an ubuntu VM or two next to truenas, now I run a fully managed home network, unifi gear, pfsense firewall, proxmox running on my server with nearly a dozen VM's and even more docker containers. That didn't happen all at once, it took gradual learning and incremental improvements in understanding. Put the time in, and you will be rewarded. Thats really the only way this hobby can work.

[rgbrobot]

12 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

Don't try and eat the elphant in 1 bite.... [...] the only way this hobby can work.

Thanks for the response, and honestly, for taking the pressure off. To be honest, I just wanted the HA setup, but this dude got me set up with the gear, so I figure I need to start using it. 

 

What I think the primary focus right now is getting Pihole set up, and basic blacklisting going. Then I can figure out the fancy stuff (aka videos that tell me I'm running my pihole wrong). 

 

Thanks again for the response. 

[LIGISTX]

1 hour ago, rgbrobot said:

Thanks for the response, and honestly, for taking the pressure off. To be honest, I just wanted the HA setup, but this dude got me set up with the gear, so I figure I need to start using it. 

 

What I think the primary focus right now is getting Pihole set up, and basic blacklisting going. Then I can figure out the fancy stuff (aka videos that tell me I'm running my pihole wrong). 

 

Thanks again for the response. 

Pihole, for the most part, only does 1 thing for home users and thats adblocking. So either its working, or its not working.... there isn't much to do once you get it working. You can't really "run it wrong". Just need to spin up a docker container under unraid with it running (or a VM, either works), once its running you need to point your router at it for DNS (make sure pihole is set to use a static IP so this never changes). Once you are pointing your router at it for DNS, your router should then distribute that DNS address to all DHCP clients and boom, you are done. 

 

For HA, it really just depends on the devices you have. If they are compatible with HA out of the box, its incredibly easy to set them up. If not, things will get a LOT more exciting for you... 

 

Step 1 is really: is unraid up and running? Are you hosting SMB shares to take advantage of it as an actual NAS? Can you spin up VM's and docker containers successfuly? If yes, create a VM and use the HA OS, don't use the docker container. In my experience the full HA OS is much easier to use since you don't need to mess with docker networking at all. Once that is running, you pretty much just start plugging in smart devices and adding their integrations to HA.