d2k1

Well, the coordinator is probably not the problem, and the soil sensors are probably fine, too; from what I have heard Thirdreality devices are generally quite good. I trust you are using a USB extension cable for the coordinator and don't have it plugged in directly in the USB port?

No idea how good the smart plugs are, but if one of the soil sensors is basically next to the coordinator and still falls off the network randomly then the problem is likely not the plugs or the network mesh.

All things being equal I would suggest switching to zigbee2mqtt and see if that helps. Even if it doesn't, and the culprit is something else, zigbee2mqtt is (in my experience) better in the long run, because it generally supports more devices than ZHA and is much quicker in getting new devices supported.

Hard to tell, it may have to do with your zigbee coordinator or the number of repeater devices in your network.

Which coordinator do you use?

If the network is not well meshed then the link quality could be too low for the sensors to reliably stay online. Adding repeater devices (mains powered devices like bulbs) could help here. Or if you have too many devices your coordinator may be overloaded. I had this problem for a while where I basically had to restart the coordinator because every device was offline. This happened once or twice a month. A firmware update helped here.

Generally zigbee2mqtt is superior to ZHA in my experience, but a little more work to get running. But you will find lots of documentation and YouTube tutorials on how to set it up. Not sure if it will help if your network is "weak" though.

But even if your zigbee network is great there are some devices that are just shit. I have a few analog LED controllers that randomly drop off the network and will only rejoin after cutting power to them. Doesn't matter how good the link quality is, they go offline sometimes.

So maybe the soil humidity sensors are just not good?

Ikea smart home stuff uses Zigbee, and just about all of their devices are supported in Home Assistant, either with ZHA or, better, zigbee2mqtt. I have dozens of buttons, bulbs and sensors from Ikea and they are very reliable most of the time.

That's not correct. The expression refers to the shards of broken glass after the Nazis destroyed the windows of Jewish stores and homes; among many other atrocities, like killing over a hundred Jewish people.

Which is why we don't use the expression any more and refer to these events as the November pogroms instead, because that better conveys the scope.

I agree. I recently re-watched the four seasons of Lower Decks after having seen the whole series only once before and thus having forgotten many details and episodes. That Peanut Hamper episode was the only one I skipped immediately as soon as I realised which episode it was. Just awful and boring, both the episode and the character.

HAproxy is good at what it does but it's only good at proxying and simple rules. For the most part, it's used as a load balancer and router and doesn't really process the requests itself.

To add something here: HAProxy's ACLs are more powerful than anything nginx, Apache or even Envoy can do. Of course HAProxy is not a web server but "just" a reverse proxy that speaks HTTP (and TCP) but what you can do with its ACLs is often extremely impressive in its simplicity and elegance. A single-line ACL in HAProxy would require loading additional modules in nginx and writing a screenful of configuration directives. Though the average self-hoster will probably never need any of the power HAProxy offers.

In the past 20 years I have professionally used all four of these as web servers and/or reverse proxies and I am pretty confident that HAProxy beats all others when it comes to request processing. Though Envoy might be getting there.

This is bewildering. Are you really subject to regulations that forbid you from storing and using rain water as you see fit? Because you must buy water from a third party?

Is there a reason behind this other than capitalism?

But what can it do more easily than an mid 20th century home can do?

One word: Automations. Everything from lights to irrigation, HVAC to surveillance cameras, fishtanks to plant monitoring, managed by a single, extensible open source platform, hosted locally in your own home.

Of course that is not trivial. If you don't see your smart home as a hobby you enjoy putting time and effort into then the smart home scene is not for you, especially not Home Assistant.

Sounds like you are in a fine place with your home, so you are probably not the target audience here.

With plugins you mean add-ons like Z2M, Mosquitto or VSCode Server, right?