I know how things work. I’m still using the hue app, but I added my hue bridge to my home assistant (running on a core i5 micro system, instead of a raspberry Pi), and I’ve been replacing my lights with zwave bulbs from inovelli as they break or stop working (or were just adding new lights to the system).
I’m struggling with how to grant outside access right now. Either I’m going to use zerotier or do a global redirect through a port forward or reverse proxy or something. Maybe a CloudFlare thing… I dunno. I haven’t decided, but the need to connect from outside the house is pretty small, so I’m not in a rush to make a decision.
I’ll eventually get rid of hue. By comparison, the bulbs are pretty dim, but bluntly, they’re pretty old now, some are starting to fail. Takes a long time for LED bulbs to fail, so it probably won’t be long now.
I own a few domain names, so I would use that. Since it’s DHCP for my WAN, I might go with a dynamic DNS but use a redirect from my domain name to it (CNAME entry, if you’re familiar with DNS).
But ZT is superior to wire guard (and most other VPN systems) in that it does automatic NAT traversal. So if I use ZT, I don’t need to worry about port forwards. ZT does everything for me (NAT “hole punching” and handles all aspects of the VPN connection).
With CloudFlare, I can use one of my domain names, pointed at their service and essentially it acts as a combination of reverse proxy and VPN to the system…
I’m mostly concerned about any exploits related to the web service built into Casa OS, that someone could spoof a request that breaks security, so I’m hesitant to just expose it to the internet like that. VPN would be better but requires a lot more set up on the family computers, phones and such.
There’s also the option of Nabu Casa, the home assistant cloud subscription, which would help home assistant financially (which is a good thing), and get me the functionality I’m looking for, but I’m not keen on yet-another-subscription-service coming out of my account every month. I’ve been trying to cut back on those things. I already don’t pay for Netflix, Disney+, etc. I don’t really want to add to that list that I’m trying to get to zero.
Too many options. Ugh.