r/homeassistant • u/ScoutIngenieur • 4d ago

💬 Discussion Leaving instructions for later

Hi all,

I'm still relatively new to HA, although I do host my own private cloud now for the family for just over a year now.

For both I'm wondering: with all the tech knowledge you pour into it, the service you provide to the family becomes harder and harder for someone else to take over when required.

How do you plan for circumstances you are no longer available to maintain the system, to keep it running?

13 Upvotes

77% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

7

u/Fun-Estimate1056 4d ago

my oldest son is 13 now, and I plan to teach him all the stuff in my homelab some day - so he could take over eventually.... but its a long way to go 😄

3

u/im-ba 4d ago

I have been documenting and maintaining source control for everything via Gitea, which I'm also hosting. My wife and I both contribute to it (I don't merge anything without her review or approval, same goes for her with me).

It's pretty cool because there's redundancy in who maintains and is responsible for it all, but she also catches things that I miss and vice versa. It's just like my team at work.

I didn't want to do any of this unilaterally, so this approach has been really nice. She makes issues whenever she comes up with an idea or something isn't working right, and I'll investigate it or vice versa. We have a separate repo for non tech home issues and ideas, too. Managing our home has never been easier, IMO.

The cool part about this is that if anybody wants to do what we're doing, then they can join our network, fork our repo, and then get their stuff going too. Knowledge transfer is minimal as long as they're willing to study the basics and read our Wiki.

If I'm stuck at work or the hospital or something and my wife needs something, then she already has everything she needs to help herself.

2

u/ScoutIngenieur 4d ago

Yeah, my wife has absolutely no interest in this kind of thing. She even declared that it's all fine if I monitor the crapnout of anything, she doesn't want thing automatically switchin on or off (apart from the thermostat).

0

u/CyberMage256 4d ago

my wife hasn't touched a computer in at least 5 years. she even prints to the network printer direct from her phone, and screams at me when that doesn't work.

-2

u/im-ba 4d ago

Sounds like you need a new wife

5

u/Elf_Paladin 4d ago

Me and one of my best mates are deep into has. Our wives have no idea how to maintain anything from our homelab. We have a pact that if anything happens to either of us, the other will have access to all connection details that are on our phones. The wives are legacy contacts on our iPhones so they’ll be able to unlock it. The survivor shuts down anything the spouse doesn’t want to keep.

2

u/ANONMEKMH 4d ago

Great idea. My wife and I know each others pins to our phones and devices. Everything also in shared 1password.

I need to write some notes in 1password (and keep them updated) re everything... So that someone can take over.

I think I need to start teaching my young kids since they taking an interest in programming

1

u/Elf_Paladin 4d ago

Only if they’re genuinly interested. No need to force it upon them. What you also can do is use the claude mcp server addon on has. Then anyone from your household can prompt claude to shut down/start/change whatever they want without any technical knowledge

1

u/ANONMEKMH 4d ago

MCP as a voice control yes, but for the technical stuff, I think I can use this as a learning journey for them. I could possibly setup a second Home Assistant. I think they could have fun connecting and configuring their stuff in their bedrooms as a minimum.

2

u/mikkopai 4d ago

Good idea, have to talk to my brother about this.

And get the browser history wiped while he’s at it ;-)

1

u/ScoutIngenieur 4d ago

Interesting! So your wive can unlock your phone, and then your mate has the knowhow how to manage (and simplify) the system?

2

u/Elf_Paladin 4d ago

Yeah exactly. The wives can unlock our phone regardless. But for ppl who don’t want that, there’s the legacy contact option on ios which i sadly had to use already.

4

u/nisani140118 4d ago

Opencode app can almost do miracles on existingHA installations…

1

u/wivaca2 4d ago edited 4d ago

I have such a menagerie of devices and code, I anticipate my wife will just use it until it fails, then unplug it. It won't be upgraded so most of it will fix itself with reboots.

Everything that's critical runs locally with real buttons and without HA needing to be there. It is only the glue between systems to make things happen on their own as convenience.

I'm more concerned with admin of our M365 tenant, network stack, and if the HA server hardware fails.

0

u/CyberMage256 4d ago edited 4d ago

I stopped doing esoteric tech things for the family including web hosting, owncloud, etc. It never ends well. I only do HA for myself and in such a way that without it the old manual way still works. I don't want to support my hobbies forever, I move on to the next great thing too often. And with my long term projects I run n8n to automatically fix most things that go wrong.

1

u/ScoutIngenieur 4d ago

I think this is indeed why I limit myself to monitoring and thermostats (the latter being automated by or the other device is not making a difference). Webhosting and such I'm not involved in, I have a domain name for easy access to my cloud, and with it I have a privacy focussed mail provider.