I’m working on a backup/failover setup for my Home Assistant instance and could use some input—especially around handling the Z-Wave USB stick.
The goal is to have a backup system that I can start up remotely if the primary HA system goes down. I’m using Docker on both machines, and I have volumes for HA, Z-Wave JS, MQTT, and MariaDB syncing to the backup.
Where I’m hitting a wall is with the Z-Wave stick. I have a second identical stick and can do an NVM restore if needed. So in theory, I could have that plugged into the backup system and bring it online. But obviously, having both sticks active at the same time would cause problems for the Z-Wave network. The backup system is typically off but comes up periodically to sync the docker volumes.
I was hoping to just cut power to the sticks using a powered USB hub, but turns out the powered hubs I have still power the stick even when the external power is off.
Has anyone figured out a clean way to toggle USB power remotely or otherwise disable one stick before bringing the other online? Would love to hear if anyone’s done something similar—or if using a secondary controller is a better route.
Yes, it looks like that could work. The flashing part will be some new ground to cover. It does add another component in the signal path which will decrease the reliability of the primary. But I guess that may be fine in order to have a backup system. Have you used these?
I have not, but there are reports of use here on the forum. Personally I have my Z-wave controller on a raspberry pi and HAOS on Proxmox, so the VM can fail over between 3 nodes in the cluster and they all just connect to both the Z-wave and Zigbee hardware via TCP.
You could probably accomplish what you’re after with a couple POE powered ESP32s, and GPIO module Z-Wave devices. As long as you retain the ability to manage the POE switch you could keep a hot/cold setup and power on the spare ESP32 in the event your primary fails. You’d probably have to point your containers to the new IP, and push a NVM backup to get back up and running but it would give you redundancy.
This does seems like a lot of added complexity for a pretty niche failure mode.
Yes, I have POE managed switches and can turn power on and off on each port. I would like to stay with my existing Aeotec Gen5+ sticks as they have been super reliable.
I had this failure not long ago. The power supply for the Host died which took the zwave network offline. I was able to access WIFI devices to see what was going on. Then five days later my Aeotec Smart Switch 7s all turned off by themselves which turned off the cable modem and WIFI router. At which point we had no visibility into the house.
which turned off the cable modem and WIFI router. At which point we had no visibility into the house.