seperis

So I moved a few months ago, and only just now had time between work and school to set up my smart home again. Which turned out to be a sort-of blessing, since HA did some updates and the one for sensor and binary sensor templates dramatically screwed me as I template a lot. It also gave me the opportunity to upgrade my Yellow's Pi module, and I found (though haven’t installed) an internal z-wave module for it, which I'll do when I'm off for Christmas and New Year.

However, since I am starting fresh, I thought I'd ask around on best practices. So I use the Orbi Pro 6 which has three primary and one guest SSID, and I have it behind a Google router in its DMZ because we have Google Fiber here. Which also turned into an advantage because I wanted to a.) do full IoT isolation and also b.) have someplace to put my singleboard computers and my servers that's safer but still have internet access plus c.) avoid wifi congestion (three VLANs plus the primary router's wifi takes care of that nicely).

On the Orbi: VLAN1 is primary and where I keep my singleboard computers, my servers, two TVs, X-Box, Switches, and my laptop. VLAN2 is for IoT hubs, cameras, Roomba, etc. VLAN3 is strictly lightbulbs, which sounds ridic but when I did a wifi analysis they really really super really take up a lot of wifi bandwidth, I've been slowly replacing with Hue and other zigbee, but it's in progress. I may move the cameras there as well.

What I need to figure out is the best way to connect everything to Home Assistant. What I was doing was attaching Yellow to VLAN1 by ethernet and VLAN2, VLAN3, and the primary SSID by wifi. On the Orbi router is an mDNS gateway page so I set it to connect my VLANs so they can exchange some data.

But now I have some time to design, and also, I can run multiple instances of HA on one of my servers. I had been doing that anyway to test any chances and test and run Add-ons that I wrote myself, just not a permanent one (again, test instance; I murdered it a lot and spun up a new one when things got weird).

So for anyone who deals with multiple SSIDs or VLANs (or just has an opinion): keep Yellow as is or go with the multiple instances and use Remote Home Assistant (which I used with my test instance and it worked very well) to send entities in the VLANs back to Yellow? Anyone?

My SmartThings Hub is (slowly) starting to error out more and more. I'm doing a soft reset monthly to keep everything up ( I did a hard reset about a year ago when I moved), which works, but I think it's time I start learning a new hub, preferably one not discontinued. My original plan was to put everything in Home Assistant when this time came, but a.) I really like it as my home coordinator with my custom scripts and addons and I don't want to mess with what is working right now and b.) while I'm getting the hang of running zigbee on there, zwave is in progress and thread...not really working most of the time.

So. I need to buy a general all-protocol hub; any recommendations that are fully compatible with Home Assistant? One with custom scripting would be a huge plus; I miss doing that in SmartThings.

I hope I can explain this correctly; I am only somewhat familiar with docker.

I have a script that I run after Home Assistant OS updates; it updates the alpine operating system with some extra packages and creates three symlinks in /usr/local/bin for three scripts in /config/shell_scripts. Up until now, it's run perfectly when I run it manually over ssh.

Then I decided to create an automation to run it automatically after an HAOS update, and while the package updates work, the script says those symlinks exist already so it doesn't create them; they do not exist, HAOS deletes them after an update (and Core updates might too, but I usually update them together so never checked).

After a lot of frustration, I logged into Home Assistant with root on the 22222 port and found it's checking and finding the previously created symlinks from earlier HAOS updates inside /mnt/data/docker/overlay2/../usr/local/bin and /var/lib/docker/overlay2/../usr/local/bin. At least, that's my guess; googling docker and overlays has been a trip.

So my question: how do I structure the script so that the symlink check is within the docker container's version of /usr/local/bin so it will create the symlink?

I get the answer is probably super obvious, but I am not seeing it. The only other thing I can think to do is export /homeassistant/shell_scripts to PATH but while that works over ssh, I haven't tested that running as a shell script service and I really want to automate this process.

Screenshot of full script attached; here's the short version I'm using for testing. This has been checked with and without variables for paths.

#!/bin/bash

# variables
bin_home="/usr/local/bin"
shell_home="/homeassistant/shell_scripts"

# add packages
pkgs="coreutils figlet iproute2 iw jq procps-ng sed util-linux wireless-tools"
apk add $pkgs
echo "Packages Updated"

ln -s "$shell_home/lib_comp" "$bin_home/lib_comp"
ln -s "$shell_home/ipa_status" "$bin_home/ipa_status"
ln -s "$shell_home/ssh_text" "$bin_home/ssh_text"

echo "Done"

So my Home Assistant Blue suffered a tragedy last year and I temporarily switched to using a Pi 4. Then Ameridroid had the Yellow (PoE!) available, and here I am with a Yellow, waiting for the CM4 ( CM4108032) and SSD to arrive tomorrow, and realizing I have no idea what to expect or if there is anything I should expect when I start the config and move this weekend.

Background: I've run HA for roughly four years now on Pi4, Odroid, and in Docker on my server, but since moving it to the Pi while waiting for the Yellow to come in stock, I've only done basic maintenance and working on other projects, so on a guess, I'm going to have to brush up my python and yaml. And anything that's changed that I may have missed.

This will be a scratch initial installation; after linking up my integrations and getting my naming conventions consistent, I'll start copying my yaml files and code over and decide how much of my interface I want to keep.

Any advice would be appreciated if there's anything that's very different with the Yellow hardware. I use two SmartThings Hubs for zigbee, zwave, and matter over Thread control for the most part but have been dipping my toes into direct zigbee control (just not that well yet) and trying to get direct matter over thread to work (not going well at all). And do I need my skynet dongle or Sonoff zigbee dongle or will the built in module work across the board?

So I just did my first install of Proxmox a few months ago in my home server, and I'm seriously, seriously in love, enough that I decided to use it to run my media server as well; it runs Plex, act as a NAS for my media and backups, etc.

Specs: CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600G Board: ASRock B550 Steel Legend RAM: 32 GB DDR4 3200 OS Drive: Samsung 970 Evo 500GB PCIe 3.0 Storage: 50 TB over six drives (all media), all mounted directly to Proxmox

RGB: Fans: 10 CORSAIR iCUE RGB Elite Performance Power Supply: Corsair CX750F RGB

Running (always): Containers: Plex, Docker, Jellyfin (still experimenting) (Docker runs docker images for MakeMKV, Handbrake and MediaInfo, but it's only up when I am using them.(

Before Proxmox, Cassiope ran on Solus Budgie and before that Xubuntu, and while OpenRGB could be cranky, with Solus I had full control all the RGB elements so I know how to use it. I spun up a Xubuntu VM and installed OpenRGB in it and connected to it after some tinkering but not to everything, but I figured that was just because I hadn't done the hardware connections to the VM correctly. Still, it was there.

It not only did not let me control them, it turned everything RGB off. I had to shut down the server and restart cold for them to come back on and I could not connect and it also started fucking with my lights. I killed the VM, tried again, couldn't connect at all. Just to see what happened, I installed directly to Proxmox with the image and it connected.

It did not go well. Short version, I had to scrub the install and flash my board's BIOS, and so no more experimenting on my media server. I moved some of it to my other server, Watson (similar specs but AMD Ryzen 7 3700X CPU and less storage and 64 GB RAM CORSAIR Vengeance RGB Pro) .

I tried in Xubuntu, Solus, EndeavourOS, Linux Mint, then--just to see what happened--directly on Proxmox. This progressed and ended literally the same way but with more and weirder steps: the VMs would fail, my board started acting up, I (again) tried with a direct install to Proxmox, and yes I had to scrub, flash the BIOS, and reinstall everything.

I am new to Proxmox but I've been jumping distros in Linux for well over a decade and except for EndeavourOS (which is amazing, I finally like Arch), all the VM OSes I used I know very, very well and all worked with OpenRGB perfectly. I have broken many installs and had to scrub over the years like a lot but generally it was something I did either on purpose or because I made a mistake. (or while root, deleted my entire OS; it happens). I was very methodical and very careful, especially when I switched to my other server and took notes; there was nothing I did--or for that matter, was even able to do--that should have caused this. So my guess is I need to do some configuration in Proxmox to get my hardware to connect to the VM (or to use it directly on Proxmox) , but I don't even know where to start and after flashing two separate boards, I'm a little shy on guessing randomly. Yes, I have googled a lot but nothing I read that I tried worked.

I would really really like control and use of my fans and lights but I really, really love Proxmox and the flexibility of a hypervisor and I'm learning so much and barely scratched the surface, so I'd like an alternative to having a lot of very pretty lights that I can't control. Right now, OpenRGB seems to be the only game in town for iCue or Polychrome when not in Windows, so--help?