Home Assistant install without breaking my network, Advice?

Home Control Software
1

Hello, I’m new to this Home Automation. I’ve come to really appreciate Jonathan’s videos! I’m a old IT Professional, 30+ years running and managing an ISP datacenter, it’s SysAdmin, Network Engineer, etc, etc. As I look at the various Server, OS and Framework options I’m left with a quandary. My first entry into home automation was with the Smartthings. I’ve since started to move on to more self managed for all the obvious reasons. As I start to set up my home server with Home Assistant I run into some conflicts, or at least I think I do.

I have several home servers running. One is a server running Docker where I host any public access to my personal websites, and any continued services I provide (Cacti, Smokeping Master/Slave, custom written SNMP Pollers and Admin, some Motorola WiMAX utilities, Sandvine Bandwidth usage analysis, yada yada). My router/firewall forwards port 443 to my Docker server. There I have a setup where any website/service/tool I want to have public access is proxy’d through a container that handles all the SSL and forwarding to the proper subdomain/container. I simply set up a new docker-compose file with the necessary options and viola. I, of course, ensure I have public DNS A and CAA entries, which I manage via DigitalOcean so no need for DuckDNS as I have a static IP for my home service.

Sorry, I got a little long winded. My quandary is that I’m not a fan of the Hass.io path that many espouse. I don’t care for the installation process as it breaks my docker services structure. It’s true I haven’t take the time to dissect the install shell script and probably could take control of that process. But I’m so used to setting up my own custom Docker Images and installing from scratch. I’ve installed Home Assistant but have had some challenges getting an MQTT broker set up. I did get a Node-Red container running by haven’t yet tried to see if it actually works. So perhaps I’m over thinking this but what advice could you give given my circumstances? I don’t want to run my home assistant server on a separate server as that breaks my Nginx SSL proxy flow.

Thank you all in advance

TD

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Welcome to the group! There is a decent sized group of people here that are passionate about home automation so hopefully we can get your questions answered. I moved your post to it’s own thread to make sure that it doesn’t get buried and stays current. Jon recently added a Discord server to the mix and it has already become an awesome place to get relatively real time solutions to problems like this one resolved. You are welcome to join everyone there as well if you have not already. SUPERHOUSE DISCORD.

I have very little networking experience compared to yourself so I will be of no help in that area but as far as Home Assistant goes, there are add-ons that can be installed within that system that give you Mosquitto brokers, Node Red and many others. So if you can get HA installed in a way that suits your network, the add-ons will take you the extra step without having to add additional servers.