Every serious home automation setup eventually grows a server, and somewhere around the third week you realise you’ve started referring to it by name. Mine is called Greg. Greg is a Mac mini M4 on a shelf, and Greg has two jobs, which is one more job than most of the people I work with.

By night Greg runs the house: Home Assistant, Plex, the media drives bolted on the side. By day Greg also runs a chunk of my actual accounting automation, because I am the kind of person who looked at a perfectly good media server and thought, you know what this needs? A second career in household automation admin. Greg does not get weekends. Greg does not complain. Greg is, frankly, a better employee than I am.

Greg. Doing the work of two men, neither of whom is paid

Running Home Assistant in Docker on a Mac taught me two things the hard way, and I’m going to hand them to you for free so you can skip the bit where you question your own competence at midnight.

One: --network=host is a lie on a Mac. Every tutorial assumes you’re on Linux. You are not. Docker on macOS runs inside its own little VM, host networking doesn’t behave, and you will debug shadows for an hour before you give up and just map the port like an adult. 8123:8123. Done. Move on.

Two: localhost is a liar. Greg can reach Home Assistant at localhost:8123 beautifully, because Greg is the only one for whom "local" means anything. The iPad on the wall, your phone, everything else in the house, none of them are Greg. They need Greg’s actual LAN IP and the port. The number of times I "fixed" a broken dashboard that was only ever broken because I’d typed localhost into a device that isn’t the host is not a number I’m proud of.

The other thing about giving a machine two jobs and a name is that it raises the stakes of a routine update. Before any macOS update, Greg gets a Home Assistant backup, and I do not touch the HA image version in the same sitting — one variable at a time, like a proper investigation. Then I confirm the boring stuff that breaks silently and ruins a Tuesday: auto-login, Docker set to start at login, the container restart policy, the Plex login item, and whether the network drives remount themselves or sulk. Miss one and you’ll find out the next morning when the lights don’t and the family does.

Anyway. That’s Greg. He asks for nothing. I’d build the whole house around him again.

THE LEDGER

Cost: one Mac mini M4 (not nothing)

Actual cost: the slow realisation I’d given a computer a more stable life than my own

Survives a firmware update? Yes, if you back up first and change one thing at a time

Verdict: Name your server. You’ll treat it better, and it’ll outlast your enthusiasm.