HA Yellow worst linux experience ever

Installation
1

#rant

so here we go:
i’ve been working in IT for about 20 years , and i thought configuring HA Yellow would be a piece of cake
but oh boy what was i wrong , setting up the same with proxmox took me about 12 minutes, but HA yellow is , in my opinion a terrible product

The instructions are simple ;
1 construct device and insert usb with the software
1.result: nothing happens , everything keeps blinking , but never a finished install.

2 try option xyz
2.result , option x y and z are not working

  1. try option pyboot with m2.ssd and usb cable
    3.result finally i have a working HA

  2. configure for another network , setting the ip manually
    4.result device never comes up again, need to resort to USB cable tty console

5.1 ip address works on current network, but switch to new network
5.1 result can’t get a new ip. , it refuses to DHCP

5.2 switching back to first network, and device is avaialble via web interface
5.2 setting the new ip manually is not succesfull , device cannotr be reached

5.3 trying to set ip in the CLI
5.3 result not possible because the contents of the cli are constantly overwritten with messages that BT is not working

  1. disable BT
    6.result Finally disabled BT via /mnt/boot/config.txt and the CLI is now quiet

  2. Change ip Manually with nmcli
    7…result nmcli only spews gibberish via the tty console , can’t use any nmcli commands because i can’t even use the console decently
    it only half of the time registers my input ,or simply refuses to respond. , sometimes the typed commands do work but are simply not shown on the screen , or i have to type a character20 times into the cli in order for it to grab…

  3. still tying to set ip. manually, and i hope i wil manage
    but so far i’ve spent more then 10 hours to get this device to work, but I’m ready to throw it in the bin .

ps finaly got it to get dhcp, device reboots , and it won’t get the interface up
been at it for another hour … but it just refuses

i am done with this piece of crap for now, but if anyone can explain why this is such a terrible experience and costing a shitload of money for the hardware , i’m open to that

it shouldn’t be this hard should it?

ps2 the compute board is a pi 4 with 4 gb ram and 16gb ecc flash but i installed an m2 ssd on the board

2

Did you get the correct image?

There is a specific image for the Yellow.

What are your router’s DNS servers?

Sometimes adding 9.9.9.9, 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 helps. For some reason a lot of DNS servers block the location of the image on github used for the initial update.

Where did you reconfigure the network?

Don’t do that. Use the HA interface. Settings → System → Network.

3

thnx for the reply @tom_l

so the setting is as following: a colleague of mine bought the yellow kit. we are both part of the IT-department, and working with Linux machines is not really an issue
at work we installed everything .

i didn’t specify everything because i know how to do some stuff.
so yes i tried the correct image , and after that didn’t do anything ( that could be due to dns since we block all other dns servers. or at least it could be plausible that dns issues did block the download of the image… ) anyway, i finally got it installed via piboot , the full image for yellow and the usb cable and after the installation finished there was life and it worked fine .

so i configured everything over a network connection close by ( on a mikrotik switch) and all seemed fine .
my colleague took it home, and the next day told me, it didn’t work.
he couldn’t find it at home,., nor was there an Ethernet link.
So we connected it at work, and again everything worked fine again .
however, on one of our aruba switches , it wouldn’t work, the link wouldn’t come up , so i grabbed another network device, in this case an old draytek router, and used the switch in it , and try something, by default the link stays down same as with the aruba switch, but the ,mikrotik switch has no issues ( we now know that connecting the yello to that switch works fine, when working with it yesterday we hadn’t figured that out fully) .
so while on the Artuba switch we connected the usb cable for tty so we at least could see what was going on, and the interface of the network simply stated “no carrier” and thus didn’t work.
we tried getting the network interface up multiple times, and sometimes it worked , sometimes it didn’t

so this was the point where i decided to set a static ip , in the hope that would do something
this didn’t work nicely because i had to do this over the TTL interface , and it works really shitty
typed n characters are not getting properly on the screen, and executions run trough each other , and it isn’t consistent either.

for instance: if i reboot the device i get everything on the creen, the entire log
however if i type
“ip a” i get somewhere between 1 and 100 lines , and mostly less then 10 lines … and thus i have to type the command about 10 times before i can see the network interface properly ( this happend on debian 12 with multiple different terminals)
after this, that was the moment i decided, now it’s time for a rant , and thus i wrote the above comment.
after this we tried a lot more , but it seems to me the network connection is not properly functioning

so what happened more:

we reset the device and connected it to the Microtik switch and tried updating the device via the web interface … it wanted to update to HA os 14 , it started updating, and did a reboot. i believe after that it was on 13.2 and didn’t find any updates.
since this update every 10 seconds i got a messages over the tty that bluetooth didn’t work, so i disabled Bluetooth in order to be able to read the ttl interface

I was successful in setting a static ip ( don’t know exactly if that was via nmcli or “ip addresses update”) , however, the only thing working was ping, i couldn’t get the web interface by going to the static ip on port 8123 this was as well on the draytek, as the mikrotik and the aruba switch , so i might have messed up there because i set the static ip via the broken tty-cli

i did reset the settings and connected it back to the mikrotik switch and it worked fine again.
we decided to quit for the day, my colleague took it home and what do you think? no Ethernet link.
He reset the device and there is a link now, but finding it on the network is still not possible, no dhcp log entry in his home router.
that’s where we at right now,

so i hope you understand we are completely fed up with this device and i hope you understand why i made this into an entire rant.

However, suggestions are still welcome.

btw , here at my own home i installed HA via proxmox on a server 2 days prior to all of this, and it works fine , got the entire setup running in about 15 minutes , and another 10 minutes to get the config transferred from my old physical HA core installation . so spending all the hours on a the Yellow now really feels like a waste of time

4

update:

we found out that everything works perfectly as long as it is connected to the mikrotik switch ( it does take a minute to get the ethernet link up, but after that it works fine )

on every otyher tried network switch and or router it will never give a link up.
for now we tested with a usb to ethernet adapter , and that works fine , also on all the other switches, so i think we are looking at a hardware fault here .

only thing I wonder now,

is the cause the LAN port / HA yellow board or the PI compute module ?
if anyone has any suggestions , i’d be interested in figuring out why this weirdest network problem ever happened to us …