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Home Assistant waters my plants

finnian.io

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Re: Home Assistant waters my plants

#61

Post by robrtsql »

zikduruqe wrote: post #48
paranoidrobot wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you can run HA as a container. I think it's a mistake - Its more complicated and has reduced features. I would instead recommend people use HAOS instead - either running on dedicated hardware OR as a VM. Just dont run it from an SD card if you go down the Raspberry Pi/SBC route - it will kill the card from IO cycles. I have an IOT VLAN on my network that all the IOT bits sit in, including WIFI devices. What int…

> it will kill the card from IO cycles. It might not. I have a Raspberry Pi 2 that has been running a weather station for over 12 years, and it has been on the original SD card. I have other RPi's doing dumb things around the house and I have never had an SD card failure. YMMV and all that.

My friend bought an ODROID and an SD card at the recommendation of some tech YouTuber for Home Assistant. Within 3 years the SD card was dead, and I had to help him re-set-up all of his stuff (this time, with a more resilient storage medium and remote backups).

YMMV certainly applies but I feel like the warning is important.

Re: Home Assistant waters my plants

#62

Post by paranoidrobot »

grvdrm wrote: post #56
paranoidrobot wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you can run HA as a container. I think it's a mistake - Its more complicated and has reduced features. I would instead recommend people use HAOS instead - either running on dedicated hardware OR as a VM. Just dont run it from an SD card if you go down the Raspberry Pi/SBC route - it will kill the card from IO cycles. I have an IOT VLAN on my network that all the IOT bits sit in, including WIFI devices. What int…

What router and associated configuration software are you using? I have a Eero mesh network that leaves a lot to be desired for a fiddler like me.

I'm using OPNSense for the router, on their dedicated hardware - DEC750 iirc.

The switches are mostly Mikrotik, with some Unifi switches.

The wifi APs are all Unifi - they are all PoE and wired into the same network, no mesh. Even between buildings I ran fibre.

For the switching and routing, were I to do it again now I might go all Unifi. They recently implemented some much needed updates to make doing things like firewall rules and routing based on device much easier. I have a complicated set of rules in OPNsense to route IOT VLAN traffic out via a VPN connection, which require static IP assignments via DHCP, but under the new Unifi network I could do it with a few clicks and being able to use device attributes rather than a static IP.

I am also using an SLZB-MR1 for a ZigBee controller and Matter over Thread border router. I've got a bunch of IKEA and Mercator ZigBee light bulbs/fixtures that act as ZigBee routers. It's a strong enough mesh I rarely have issues with the ~180 devices on the net.

Re: Home Assistant waters my plants

#63

Post by paranoidrobot »

zikduruqe wrote: post #48
paranoidrobot wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you can run HA as a container. I think it's a mistake - Its more complicated and has reduced features. I would instead recommend people use HAOS instead - either running on dedicated hardware OR as a VM. Just dont run it from an SD card if you go down the Raspberry Pi/SBC route - it will kill the card from IO cycles. I have an IOT VLAN on my network that all the IOT bits sit in, including WIFI devices. What int…

> it will kill the card from IO cycles. It might not. I have a Raspberry Pi 2 that has been running a weather station for over 12 years, and it has been on the original SD card. I have other RPi's doing dumb things around the house and I have never had an SD card failure. YMMV and all that.

I wouldn't put running a weather station in the same class of disk activity as running Home Assistant. It is writing a fairly large amount of logs, plus statistics for every attribute/sensor for every device. The more devices you have, the more you will be writing.

There are regularly threads from people with "I restarted HA and now I get this weird boot error message", and it's because their SD card died.

You do you, but it's common enough of a problem that I think it's worth calling out as a "Don't do this".

Re: Home Assistant waters my plants

#64

Post by dgacmu »

zer00eyz wrote: post #54
randusername wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also feel overwhelmed with HA homelab stuff. HA on my RPI is just not reliable, requiring a reboot 4-6 times a year for reasons I don't understand. Frustration at being in the literal dark doesn't translate to the right mindset to root cause. What I need is an opinionated guide on minimum viable virtualization, but so much of the resources online are from folks that are homelabing maximalists. I feel the same tempt…

> What I need is an opinionated guide on minimum viable virtualization Get a nuc or a mini pc: i5-8500 or better (used, ebay https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic... for a baseline of what's out there) Ram is your friend (but prices are gross). Dont be cheap on storage. Get an external USB drive (3/2/1 rule). Install proxmox on said device. Use the proxmox community scripts to install HAOS as a…

An enthusiastic two thumbs up to this approach. It's exactly what I run at home that has been working solidly. I run on an N100, which is just a hair smaller than an i5-8500, with 32GB DRAM and a 1TB SSD (total overkill). I keep it under proxmox; the box also runs my unifi SDN controller, pihole, and a linux VM for various little services. Two USB dongles for z-wave / zigbee / matter (because I'm a glutton for punishment). Backed up to a NAS. It's fast, easy, and has been very reliable.

Re: Home Assistant waters my plants

#65

Post by doctorpangloss »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #36
davemp wrote: post #17

Fun project. Though it’s kind of unreal how complicated it is to set up HA and I literally do this for a living, both embedded sw and backend web dev. Docker compose with a zwave management server, reverse proxies for TLS, vlan isolation for the server, macvlan for HA container so it does see the host network, etc, etc. All to turn on and off a lightbulb with the sun. All the while AI is telling me to configure thing…

Hate to be that guy, but I've had a lot of luck promoting gemini-cli to implement whatever I want in home assistant, and it's pretty good

The agents have saved Home Assistant. Every piece of content marketing about it should be showing how to use an agent to set up Home Assistant.

Re: Home Assistant waters my plants

#66

Post by Rebelgecko »

davemp wrote: post #17

Fun project. Though it’s kind of unreal how complicated it is to set up HA and I literally do this for a living, both embedded sw and backend web dev. Docker compose with a zwave management server, reverse proxies for TLS, vlan isolation for the server, macvlan for HA container so it does see the host network, etc, etc. All to turn on and off a lightbulb with the sun. All the while AI is telling me to configure thing…

I went through a similar process with Home Assistant. And the kicker is that months or years down the line, you'll hit some feature that doesn't work with the Docker version (I've ran into a couple)

Re: Home Assistant waters my plants

#67

Post by paranoidrobot »

ryukoposting wrote: post #60
93n wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I go the container route, and have only had one issue: allowing HA to access my system's Bluetooth adapter. I had some ESP32s lying around, so I used ESPHome to make a Bluetooth proxy, which solved that issue. I don't run addons though, which might be part of it.

Interesting. I also run HA in a container and getting it to pick up my Zigbee dongle was so easy I don't even remember how I did it. I haven't tried BT, but my HA box lives underneath a couch with a big steel pull-out bed so I don't imagine it would work very well anyway.

I haven't done it either. But it should just be a case of passing the device to the container. You might need to disable the host from using it and pass admin rights to the container too.

But it was also quite easy to pass a USB device to the HAOS VM in Proxmox.

Re: Home Assistant waters my plants

#68

Post by 93n »

ryukoposting wrote: post #60
93n wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I go the container route, and have only had one issue: allowing HA to access my system's Bluetooth adapter. I had some ESP32s lying around, so I used ESPHome to make a Bluetooth proxy, which solved that issue. I don't run addons though, which might be part of it.

Interesting. I also run HA in a container and getting it to pick up my Zigbee dongle was so easy I don't even remember how I did it. I haven't tried BT, but my HA box lives underneath a couch with a big steel pull-out bed so I don't imagine it would work very well anyway.

The host I run HA on is Ubuntu server. If memory serves me right, the Bluetooth issue was related to apparmor and dbus restrictions on docker

Re: Home Assistant waters my plants

#69

Post by paranoidrobot »

93n wrote: post #43
paranoidrobot wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you can run HA as a container. I think it's a mistake - Its more complicated and has reduced features. I would instead recommend people use HAOS instead - either running on dedicated hardware OR as a VM. Just dont run it from an SD card if you go down the Raspberry Pi/SBC route - it will kill the card from IO cycles. I have an IOT VLAN on my network that all the IOT bits sit in, including WIFI devices. What int…

I go the container route, and have only had one issue: allowing HA to access my system's Bluetooth adapter. I had some ESP32s lying around, so I used ESPHome to make a Bluetooth proxy, which solved that issue. I don't run addons though, which might be part of it.

Add-ons (now apps) can't be done without HAOS. It's one of those non-obvious things.

There's other things I forget which are also more difficult/annoying to manage on the container version.

I have a rather large docker compose stack so my first experiments with HA were as running it there.

That lasted maybe a week before I went and ran it as a VM instead.

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