Looking for recommendations for new hardware to run HA.
I am currently running HA and a few other bits and pieces on a PI3 - and while I love the little guy, I want to make sure I have enough horsepower for some additional projects, In particular I would like to move to something with a spinning disk or SSD. Also, I use the PI as my dev box so backups are a consideration. I use Crashplan for backups and although I managed to get it working on the PI it is unsupported and blew up the first time Crashplan tried to upgrade itself.
Noise is a consideration, and I would be open to a water cooled server, or ideally just a really quiet passively cooed device. I also want to stick with some form of linux distro.
Does anyone have any recommendations for hardware, as well as which linux distro they are using?
but do you want that for a device where you only have HA running?
or do you want that for a device what you use for other stuff?
if you have a dedicated HA device (PI) then you only need a backup after an update.
and because you already have a pi, you can Always run HA on that one, the second the dedicated PI fails.
I’m using a PC Engines APU2. Plus case, adapter, mSATA SSD, it’s still under $200. Silent and overkill for HASS, so plenty of room for other services. I also run Grafana, MySQL (which I’m letting take half the RAM), nginx, SSH, Zabbix monitoring, …
This is my main hobby currently so I am not worried about dropping some cash - would prefer cheaper options but I was also mulling over using a water cooled gaming rig if I couldn’t find a better option - I think the mini PC is the right place to look though and much cheaper! Ideally I would want to locate it in a rather badly ventilated space that gets hot in the summer so I will be checking the temp specs rather closely - however if it is quiet enough I can put it under the TV (central location for good ZWave coverage).
Thanks for the recommendations, running out for a while now but I’ll take a look later.
While I’m on the subject (and not wishing to start any wars) can anyone suggest a Linux distro that they are having success with? Seems like most folks are using Debian/Ubuntu/Raspian - any issues or are they all much of a muchness as far as running HA is concerned?
AFter much searching around I just pulled the trigger on an ASRock Beebox 3000 - fanless, Intel Celeron box with LAN, HDMIx3, Ethernet, bluetooth, WiFi. I added a 120GB mSATA SSD and 16GB dual channel memory. Hopefully a step up from the PI, and hopefully not a complete disaster!
Yeah, that was a key consideration. I did like your idea of a mini tower and running a ton of VMs, but I think that is overkill for what I wanted and also it needs to be … quiet! This way I can put it in the living room and tell my wife its a media streamer or something rather than hide it in my hot closet which already has my cable modem, an eero, an Edge router and 2 Synologies in it …
can anyone suggest a Linux distro that they are having success with?
The one you’re most familiar with; pretty much anything modern will work.
If you’re not familiar with any, then Ubuntu LTS (currently 16.04.1). You don’t want a rolling release like Arch on a server, and CentOS is a decent choice, but get pretty long in the tooth as the months go by. It is easy to get newer software for Ubuntu (as long as you trust random people’s PPAs) and there is MUCH more community support for it. Debian’s also good, but also not as popular/supported as Ubuntu.
And on further study, it looks like Ubuntu LTS 16.04.1 has kernel 4.4 in it which apparently has much better Braswell support than Debian Jessie with it’s 3.16 kernel… Not that I am averse to building my own kernel, but that would cut in to my HA time, so Ubuntu it is!
For a shade under $250 I have 120GB SSD, 16GB Dual Channel Ram and an N3000 CPU, it comes with WiFi, Bluetooth, HDMI (x3) Ethernet and a remote control (which I am hoping that LIRC will support)
Initial impressions are that it is a very well put together and solid device. Fitting memory and the mSATA disk were very easy and it booted up first time. I made a USB boot image of Ubunto LTS 16.04 and it installed like a dream, home assistant installed easily as expected and now I am working on OpenZWave.
The unit is silent and runs only mildly warm and is more than suitable to put in a living room or somewhere similar. I haven’t really stressed it yet, but I noticed a huge difference in performance over my PI3 when compiling OpenZWave - probably because this is a disk intensive activity and the SSD is much faster than the PI’s memory card, which was one of the main reasons I bought it.
Overall, if someone is looking for a big brother to a PI with a small footprint and passive/silent cooling, I can recommend this unit.
Okay, so any info on how to go about compiling OpenZwave? This is where I got hung up in trying to get HA installed on Linux Mint Sarah. I had a spare, relatively new laptop laying around with good hardware and wanted to get it to work on that machine, but could not get OZW setup and working.
