I know this probably comes up a lot and I’ve done some reading but it’s a little overwhelming so I thought I’d just post to help me get my thoughts together. I want to set up HA primarily to start using it with Frigate and give me remote access to my cameras but I might as well double down and get everything on this. I like the idea of clever houses and I’m glad there’s a good option for doing it locally with decent FOSS solution.
So in my network I have a sort of DMZ network. This network has all those dodgy IoT devices on it and it’s basically an untrusted network with internet access. I then have my normal network with everything else on it, like my laptop, phones, home server, etc. I’m planning on installing HA in a Podman container (Docker) on my server but I’d like to have some remote access so I can check out my cameras, 3D printer, and maybe a few other things, I’d also like to be able to receive notifications. However I still want to be able to run it normally without too many complications so I’d like it internal to my trusted network.
I’m thinking about the possibility of running two containers, one on my trusted network and one on my DMZ. I could sync them up or give them access to the same storage areas maybe. Is this possible? ChatGPT suggested it so I’m not sure if it’s worth pursuing. If not what are my other options? I basically want all the positives of having it on the internet with none of the negatives, how hard can that be?
I am not sure how two synced HA instances (if that’s even possible) would help. You would need to allow your IoT devices to be accessible by the Home Assistant instance you want to use with your personal devices. If that seems like a risk to you, then why not run HA in the DMZ alltogether?
You can configure HA to use an external database, so you could (presumably) config two instances to use the same DB. Not sure how much conflict that would cause for entities that are only attached to one of those instances, but it seems like both should have the same access to state data and history. Could probably even set one instance up with read-only DB access to limit data conflicts, although I imagine HA will complain about that.
Even with an external database, HA still uses its internal DB for some things, so I don’t think you’d ever get identically mirrored instances.