antsu

Damn, that’s scary indeed! First of all, congratulations on your resolve to take control of your data. You have a long journey ahead of you, but don’t be discouraged, take one step at a time and don’t be afraid to ask for help.

As for where to start, I think you’ve already figured it out yourself: invest some time in learning the basics of networking. You don’t need to become an enterprise-level networking wizard, just learn the basics: learn what an IP address is, what a network mask is (sometimes also referred to as “prefix length”), what DNS is and does, how to change these settings on your home network and why you’d want to change them. Try stuff, break it, fix it, repeat. Also, if you’re not familiar with or already using it, it might be a good opportunity to pick up Linux. If you’re coming from Windows, a beginner friendly distribution like Linux Mint will do nicely. Try installing it on an old computer to see what it’s like, poke at it until you’re comfortable, then maybe make it your main operating system. Knowing Linux basics (command-line shenanigans in particular) will give you a big edge when you decide to start hosting your own services.

Can’t tell if this is criticism on non-vegans or if someone just really wants it to be socially acceptable to fuck a cow.

I have Alarmo setup in HA with a bunch of ZigBee sensors and it’s brilliant. I haven’t used it with cameras, but considering Frigate exposes motion sensors, I think this should work fine.

And yes, you can do this with just Frigate and a HA automation, but it would be less flexible.

“Good” is whoever ends up winning at the end.

Uptime Kuma monitoring anything I care about and notifying me via Matrix, or notifying me via email if it’s Matrix that’s down.

If you’re using BTRFS, check if you don’t have any stray snapshots.

I understand this is not exactly what you’re asking for, but if you have access to a terminal, you can “unshorten” a link with:

curl --head -L https://example.com/short | grep: location