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Posts on Practice

Collected posts on Practice — from our practice running fleets of Home Assistant instances.

Product · Walkthrough

HA Fleet Manager in four screenshots

A quick visual walk through HA Fleet Manager: the whole fleet at a glance, one installation in detail, remote updates, and warnings about risky versions. No long essay, just four pictures.

DO Denny Ovčar
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Practice · Guide

Home Assistant remote maintenance without VPN — and without an open port

Home Assistant remote maintenance without VPN: no open port, no full-LAN access. Why both are wrong and what time-boxed, client-granted access looks like.

DO Denny Ovčar
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Practice · Guide

Home Assistant fleet management: multi-tenant beats the DIY rig

Managing multiple Home Assistant instances for clients with remote_homeassistant, an MQTT bridge or a VPN hits a wall. Why fleet management is its own category.

DO Denny Ovčar
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Market · Encouragement

A Home Assistant business: can you build a living on open source?

No vendor behind you, forever at the customer site, updates that wreck everything — the three big fears about going pro with Home Assistant. Why WordPress carried exactly the same fears and still spawned an entire service industry.

DO Denny Ovčar
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Explainer · Tech

CGNAT and Home Assistant — why your port forwarding is about to stop working

If you sit behind Carrier-Grade NAT you no longer have your own public IPv4 — port forwarding silently dies. What CGNAT is, how to spot it, and which remote-access options for Home Assistant still work.

DO Denny Ovčar
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Profession · Market

What does a Home Assistant integrator actually do? Job profile, tools, business models

In German-speaking Europe "Home Assistant integrator" is barely an established profession — and that is exactly the opportunity. Who looks after HA for a living, what they do day to day, the tools they reach for, how they get paid.

DO Denny Ovčar
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Privacy · Argument

Why "local stays local" is the best sales argument an integrator has

Home Assistant ties together cameras, door locks, heating, presence data — sometimes medical devices. What the customer actually gets when the house isn't piped into the cloud, and why solo integrators have an argument here that big platforms structurally can't answer.

DO Denny Ovčar
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Fiction · Story

Thursday, 14:32 — the Z2M cascade nobody was meant to hear

A fictional shift in the life of a solo integrator: three Z2M crashes after a silent add-on update, and the forty minutes between the first symptom and a quiet fix.

DO Denny Ovčar
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