Diagnosing lockups of HassOS on Pi4

Hi all,

After a long, long period without any issues at all, I’m having periodic lockups of my HA instance. This is running vanilla HassOS (up to date) from a clean install onto a new uSD card (SanDisk “max endurance”, bought new one month ago when the problem started in an attempt to diagnose it) and my imported configuration, while tweaked a little, hasn’t changed too much over the last 6 months.

When it fails, it seems to just drop off the network and stops responding to pings. It always recovers with a power cycle and, at the moment, lasts for maybe 3-4 days before it fails again. It doesn’t always fail at the same time of day and I can’t get any pattern from it.

I would appreciate some suggestions on how to diagnose this as, when it last happened, I pulled the HA logs before rebooting, but they didn’t contain anything useful that might suggest why it had failed. The Pi4 has been a pretty good platform for me, but I depend on HA too much now, so if I can’t work out why this is happening, I might just have to bin the Pi altogether :confused:

Any suggestions, tips or assistance would be very much appreciated.

Thanks.

If the machine does not even respond to ping, it’s probably an issue with the underlying GNU/Linux operating system.
When you experience the freeze next time, before rebooting, take a look at non-HA-related logs (dmesg, journalctl -b, stuff in /var/log/). I guess you’ll need to hook up a screen and a keyboard to the RPi if networking does not work.

maybe you SD Card is having problem… you should replace it with SSD

I guess you’ll need to hook up a screen and a keyboard to the RPi if networking does not work.

Thanks - was thinking about getting a screen on it for exactly this. I guess that’s the next move!

Thanks. I considered this when this first started happening, but reading this post about it, it still looks a pretty enormous faff to setup on a Pi 4 (at least compared to SD boot which literally takes 5 mins to do).

In the end, I just bought a new, high-endurance SD card so I could rule out a failing SD card, but the lockups have continued at about the same frequency. I suspect that if I can’t resolve this, my next step will be to dump the Pi altogether for some more robust hardware, which will support SSD properly!