#Should I scrape HAOS and go to HA in a container?

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

short scaffold
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I have spent the past 3 entire days beating my head against the wall on the HA setup I would like to achieve. Started with HA in a windows VM. Then when I realized it was limited went to HAOS. At each step I had to learn and work on so many steps.

End goal:

  • Control my smart home devices and add automations with plans to expand. (currently just lights, but I want to add presense sensors, motion detection and way too many other ideas I may or may not ever get to)
    • Then provide my wife a simple to use GUI dashboard on the HA android app that she can just press buttons and expect things to just work.
  • View my wyze cams locally and remotely without sending them to wyze. (With motion dection events and notifactions)
    • Use the same PC as a localy controlled NVR
  • Create a NAS for home file backups and get off of googles teet.

I am trying to do all this on the same machine (64bit I7 desktop, with 8 gigs of RAM). I have the smart home part going reasonably well. That was so many side quests I cannot even begin to remember them all.

Been working on the cameras all day. Got the wyze docker bridge working as an add on. Got the feeds mostly working though the web ui. Trying to figure out how to stream them live to a dashboard, and or webui. Then figure out how to record them on the the HA server hard drive.

Started working on figuring out the frigate integration > MQTT > > MQTT broker

Got though the broker, and MQTT (I think anyway) and went back to the frigate integration. Now I realize, it's an "integration" and that should have clued me into.. I don't have frigate setup anywhere else.

So.. Should I back up this entire HA install, and start over with the goal running HA as docker install on proxmox, so that I can run a NAS, and frigate also as dockers? I am fairly sure I can get there eventually even if I run into challenges. So far I have overcome each problem, even if it took hours to get there.

Or is there a better way to achieve my end goals?

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Thank you for any opinions in advance 🙂

patent sail
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Delete the wyze cams from your home if you want security cameras that work well with frigate

short scaffold
patent sail
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If nothing else you can migrate later but you probably won’t want to

short scaffold
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I do plan to get rid of the wyze cams, but currently the budget for this is very low.

patent sail
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Are you already a docker compose guy?

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Or learning everything

short scaffold
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Learning everything 😅

patent sail
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Then use haos

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In a vm on proxmox like the link goes over

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I like and use unraid but it’s not what I’d suggest given your wall of text above

sonic mountain
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In Unraid OS, you can just install the HA docker and set it up, there is little config needed in docker compose. Just a suggestion

short scaffold
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I did just google that when I saw it in the main thread. I don't really have the funds to invest in software right now, if there is an open source option. Even if it means more work.

patent sail
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Please spend 5 min and look at that guide for proxmox its very detailed

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Or just backup haos and try it

short scaffold
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I appreciate both your opinions! I need to take the dogs to park before dark (been at this since 8am without much stopping, lol) and I will come back and read that guide step by step.

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Can I use my current HA backup if I do the Proxmox route? (I realize configs will have to be changed)

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Going to listen to some videos about both options while I'm out (if I can find them)

sonic mountain
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Well the Unraid pricing is about to increase so if you can swing it in the near future, now would be the time. Proxmox is good too, Truenas, even

patent sail
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If he said he wanted Plex and a whole server build unraid makes sense

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He didn’t say that

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Maybe in the future it would for him

sonic mountain
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Create a NAS for home file backups and get off of googles teet.

This bullet was why I suggested a NAS software. I get that not everyone can afford it which is why I suggested TrueNAS, which is free

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😊

patent sail
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I’d rather crowdfund an unraid license before sending him to truenas forums lol

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In my experience their community is incredibly toxic compared to unraid

sonic mountain
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Well he said "even if it is more work" which it will be 😉

patent sail
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And not just their forums on Reddit and just their general userbase

sonic mountain
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lol

patent sail
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Fair but the proxmox guide I linked is actually pretty nice

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It’s a very easy way to get his feet wet without staring into a black box

sonic mountain
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I got mine to cast to me local devices remotely from the web interface finally

short scaffold
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I have decided to go with proxmox. Since I am planning on adding raid drives for the NAS storage later, I am trying to figure out if I need to use ZFS or if I can add drives later with.

This line from the linked guide is why I am not sure I can do that:

Super nerds may want to deviate from using a single drive in their Proxmox server and throw in ZFS, do ZFS mirroring, and use multiple storage devices.

It sounds like without ZFS, I cannot use multiple storage drives. Is that correct?

orchid zinc
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A lot of PVe managed storage like BTRFS, LVM, ZFS dcan do RAID. How many drives do you have, how much storage?

short scaffold
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On the desktop currently I have the OS drive, 512 gig, and a 1 TB storage drive. I plan on replacing that storage drive with either 2, or 4 drives a bit down the road. Ideally the new drives will total 12+ TB storage to be used for both the NAS and NVR.

icy blade
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I'm very new to Proxmox and ZFS so don't quote me, but you can technically add your NAS later, but I believe you'd have to add it to the existing ZFS pool as another Vdev. You can technically use multiple storage drives by just passing through different drives to each VM, but you lose any parity as you won't be using the actual ZFS pool and you're pretty much locking that specific drive to that specific VM

short scaffold
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To be clear, not looking for help on how to do ZFS, or any thing other than the main HA install. Just want to avoid having to redo this a third time 😅

The quote from the guide makes it seem like ZFS is the only way to do multiple drives on promox. That doesn't really make any sense to me, hence the question.

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I would be fine locking drives to a machine. That would kinda be ideal maybe

icy blade
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you definitely do not have to use zfs

short scaffold
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TBH I never even heard of ZFS before today

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Ok, great. That is what I was hoping to find out. Thank you both!

icy blade
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zfs is nice though as it basically gives software raid and pools your total storage together, so there's definitely benefits, but if what you're doing doesn't call for that, then you don't have to

short scaffold
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What googling I did on zfs very much made it sound like it would be another whole wall to beat my head against. For sure not trying to make this even harder on myself.

icy blade
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I could be wrong, but I'm not sure if the snapshot feature of proxmox works without a zfs setup, something to keep in mind

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it's a little confusing at first for sure, but I messed around with zfs pools for about a week in the evenings and it started to make sense. I'm going to be running a lot of different stuff on my proxmox and data redundancy is pretty important to me so I pretty much had to learn how to use it unless I wanted to pay for a good raid controller

short scaffold
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Hrm. I am new to HA, docker containers, and VMs in general. It does sound like zfs is the path to take for my end goals, but with my current hardware I think I might just push that cart down the road a bit. NAS is the last step for me. Main focus is getting HA streamlined and my cameras working along side of it.

You have given me a lot to work with. Thank you again!

icy blade
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you sound like me as of only a few months ago lol I will say that it gets easier. Personally I would say to take the time to set it up right the first time even if it takes longer because depending on how you do things, it may be a real pain to swap over if you even can. Might have to re-do a lot of it. I can understand not wanting to wait though. I'm in the middle of an entire network overhaul and then going to setup my Proxmox and VMs to get everything back up and running in a much more reliable and sensible way than I did before

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good luck though!

short scaffold
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I think I will sleep on it. Second guessing my choice already 😅

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Doing it right the first time is something I always try to do.

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Didn't expect to only get this far after spending almost 3 entire days on this, but I have already learned that nothing about this is quick :p

icy blade
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yeah, I've definitely been caught on snags for several days on specific issues I ran into that all turned out to be simple things, but at the same time, things are always simple in hindsight. For example, I was using a program to view the virtual hard drive for HA and the file path that I was seeing was different than the actual file path. I was trying to path my SSL certificate for accessing HA over HTTPS and it turned out it simply needed to go into /config

short scaffold
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I may have spent over two hours today trying to figure out why something wasn't working only to discover I was just reading a single word wrong the entire time and that was it. Yeah we sound like we are on very similar HA journey's

icy blade
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another weird thing I discovered is if you need to resort to a backup through the command line, the file name that you see in home assistant isn't the actual file name. The program I used to see the virtual drive had the file as a bunch of random letters and numbers. Seemed like maybe hexadecimal but I'm not sure. The command line only accepted that string of characters to install the backup. I've actually been meaning to ask on here if there's an easier way to see that real file name without having to use some 3rd party program

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typically you can just use the backup through the web interface though, but at one point I broke it to the point that the web interface wasn't working so I had to do it through the CLI lol

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but yeah, seems like we're in pretty similar boats so if you have any questions feel free to reach out, chances are that I recently ran into the same problems

short scaffold
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That problem would for sure get me all messed up. Thanks so much, I really do apreciate it!

short scaffold
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Took me all day so far but I finally got HA running on promox and my backup loaded and working. I haven't gotten anything done with zfs. Got lost in the weeds for hours and decided to just start here and go back to that in a bit, as I was getting frustrated.

Now that I have it running, I am trying to setup a staic IP address for HA on my router. The issue I am having is my router show "homeassistant" as one ip address but the ip shown in the HA on the promox console is different. If I try to connect with the ip the router shows, it fails. The one HA shows works. Been googling this issue for awhile now, and I am missing something simple I am sure.

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I don't see the IP shown in HA even listed as connected to my router. So it must be something to do with promox in the middle but.. I got lost here

icy blade
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I'm actually messing with zfs again as I wanted to go the extra step and create it using disk IDs that way I can be sure drive order and stuff will never matter if I have to swap drives or move them around. Let me install home assistant real quick and see if I'm seeing similar or different than you. Might be able to help once I visually see things

short scaffold
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Cool. I had to step away and do responsible things. Going to get back to this soon. Have not, as of yet, figured out how to set a static ip.

short scaffold
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Sucess!

icy blade
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I have it set up, I can confirm that my IPv4 shown on Home Assistant within Proxmox is the same IP that my router is showing for the Home Assistant VM

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oh

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nice

short scaffold
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Just now got it working correctly

icy blade
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I was going to ask how you configured your network on the vm during creation

short scaffold
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Still don't have any idea how it had one ip in the router and another in proxmox but oh well

icy blade
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what fixed it?

short scaffold
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So.. lets see

datacenter > main proxmox > home assistant vm
hardware > network decive > click it

There is where I found the MAC address. Then I went looking for it in my router. It was the same MAC address as the home assistant that was showing a different local ip than HA.

Set that MAC address a static IP in the router. Rebooted.. and it didn't work 😅

Shut down HA, shut down the entire VM, rebooted router, restarted HA and that was it 😄

icy blade
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interesting

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good 'ol reboots are always a good start lol

short scaffold
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As for the network, I tried to not use the guide that was linked here, because it didn't use zfs.. I got all kinds of lost with that guide and wasted a bunch of time. Eventually came back to the guide linked above and did a new HA install, then used HA to get the backup file from my windows desktop. That was a sticking point. Trying to get the file over eventually lead me to go back to the non zfs guide.

I think I can still do zfs.. at least I hope so. Don't have time for that now. My wife was already complaining about the lights not working this afternoon. All the voice triggered routines she knows don't work, because I haven't fully figured out how to trigger an HA automation with an alexia voice command.

I believe I am on track, to get that working using node red, but it got late last night and I had to put it on hold. Time to jump back into that

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Indeed! lol

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I did a couple before this, and it kept coming back with two different IPs.. just baffled about that one

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and.... none of this is what I needed to do today 😅

icy blade
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there's not a lot of great documentation with zfs from what I saw, it's a lot of piecing together what you need and trial and error. I started to write specific commands that I need to create it and it should be fairly simple now. I can share those with you in a second. As far as voice commands, you're going to need to do one of two things, one being super easy and the other being a much longer road. By default, you'll have to have a nabu casa account which I think is like $7 a month or so and that will tie into google assistant and alexa as well as improve the whole voice command experience. Basically create an account, log in under the Home Assistant Cloud section in settings, and you're good. If you want to save the money (keep in mind, this does directly support the HA devs) you can link the assistant through an sdk integration to your home assistant, but you'll also need to be able to externally access your home assistant with a ssl certificate. You'd also want to set up a dynamic dns for if your public IP ever changes. Then there's a whole list of commands and confirguration that needs done....at least that's how it is for google assistant, I'm assuming Alexa is the same, but maybe it's easier idk. I got to the point where I had an ssl certificate and everything, but then I started doing the whole network overhaul before I fully got google assistant working again and have just been paying for nabu casa in the meantime

short scaffold
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I do have a nabu account, and was able to remotely access it before I started over. I also have a dynamic dns setup. Haven't tried to remotely accies it yet since then. I still am not clear how to trigger an automation made in home assistant with that though. I can trigger routines I made in alexa, but I don't want to use any alexa routines any more, if I can avoid it. Don't currently use google for voice routines, but I may try that also.

I did get HA setup to automatically backup itself and upload them to google drive. Using my own google api credentials I made for the purpose.

icy blade
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what specifically are you trying to have happen? for example, as long as my lights are connected to home assistant and my google is connected through nabu casa, I can simply tell google to turn the living room standing light to 43% brightness and it will do so without having to set up anything else. You should also be able to create custom automations that trigger off of voice commands if you want something specific