I’d like recommendations and best practices on an upgrade strategy for my smart home, at least the HA component(s), anyway. I’d like a balance of patching security updates and making sure I don’t break what I got working.
I’m nowhere near finished with the smart home, but I got tuya local working (not localtuya), and my lights and contact sensors function, although the contact sensors aren’t yet on tuya local. I also don’t know which device has what IP yet. But as long as I keep Linksys E1200s in stock, the smart home will keep functioning, aside from upgrades.
But that brings me to my question. How can I get a balance of upgrading, and getting new features and security upgrades, but still make sure my smart home remains working, at least mostly, and it will be fixed when it’s not working? Should I never upgrade? Should I upgrade once a month? When should I do it. There are now already more upgrades, but I don’t want to break things, when I do it.
I rely on it working. For more information to help answer the question, I don’t like modern windows or arch Linux as far as upgrades for a daily driver for my main work. I like mint better, or at least Debian. That should help tell you how I generally prefer upgrades. This doesn’t mean in certain cases, I can’t break the rules and do something different, but for day to day tasks, it’s not recommended to keep my systems working. I’m not looking for Linux upgrade advice here, and not trying to choose a Linux distro or new OS here. It’s just a home assistant question, that’s all.
As far as I am concerned, it’s read any and all release notes before upgrading and then upgrade when you have the time to deal with any breaking changes.
I similarly only update HA at the end of each month. Even then I read all the release notes carefully. I think someone who wanted to could easily do quarterly Home Assistant updates and be fine in terms of security. Assuming, that is, that you haven’t stuck HA on the open internet. Then no amount of patching will keep you safe.
I originally DID stick HA on the open Internet, because in 2004ish that was the way you did things, and I never learned more than that. However, I’m learning more now. There are now bots out there to watch out for, that just weren’t really there then.
I’ve learned a lot, and HA remained safe for sure. It looks like my antsle was comprimised from it though, so I turned it into a proxmox server (and nothing so far is back on the open Internet). They didn’t even have proxmox, when I bought my antsle.
Actual security updates are very few and far in between. They’re usually accompanied by a Public Service Announcement and as you can see, the last one was in 2023 (which was handled automatically since Supervisor updates by itself).
You don’t have to worry if you skip a monthly update - just make sure to read all the breaking changes if you do, not just the most recent ones.
Hi, there quite some topics whether to update or not and the consequences for (not) doing it.
What I want to say with that: there are equally, and probably more, ideas about this.
Not updating can become a security issue, depending on your setup.
Also, you stay behind on new features, bug fixes, improvements, …
Updating: reading the release notes and not jumping on the wagon immediately can help a lot.
Last, but not least: make sure you have a working backup + restore strategy.
Depending on how you are running this can be less or very easy.
This can help in case something goes south so you can revert to a working system and if you don’t live alone, you avoid frustration because the lights, or whatever you have automated, doesn’t work (again).
I’m updating to new releases the same day they are available and sometimes the incremental version also, if something has changed to the frontend component and sometimes just like that.
I have had very few issues with this approach but with Proxmox, backing up and restoring is very easy, so I rely on that.