I am prepping a machine to install HAOS on. It’s an AAEON (ASUS Industrial) UP Squared which is kind of NUC like. I had played around a little with Home Assistant on a ProxMox server a while ago and was pretty impressed with it’s ability to discover devices, although had issues with getting ZigBee working there. Now that WebCORE has died with SmartThings, which is what everything I had was based on, I am recommitted to the Home Assistant world. I did do a minor detour and try a Hubitat Hub, that was disappointing. I really want this to just be an appliance and not dependent on an underlying hypervisor so looking at a straight HAOS install here. I have quite a few of these little passively cooled I5 boxes and one of the nice features is that I can put a pair of mSATA SSDs in it.
So, all that and the first question I have is, is there a way to mirror the disk? I see that HAOS isn’t installed so much as imaged over to a boot disk, so obviously it would be some sort of after the fact retrofit to get that to work, but thinking there must be a way to use LVM to do this, it is just Linux after all. I have dozens of machines running, and other than a few Raspberry Pis they all have mirrored disks, whether it be Windows, Linux, FreeBSD or Luminos. I consider that pretty much a minimally viable configuration for anything I have any kind of dependence on, short of that I’d really be looking to do some sort of high availability configuration, although I’m not really sure that would work given that ZigBee devices are pretty much married to their host. Seems like there couldn’t be a truly seamless high availability cluster because any ZigBee devices would need to be reset and repaired to the alternative host, which would very much not be seamless. Maybe through a network USB gateway device like the Silex, but I haven’t found them to be particularly dependable and I think the drivers are just for Windows and Mac. Anyway, I’d be more than pleased by just an LVM mirror, ZFS would be better, but I am sure that isn’t an option.
Since HAOS supports additional storage devices, would it be possible to do a “poor man’s mirroring” by putting regular backups on the second drive?
I see that you ran Proxmox before: To me, running on your own ZFS volumes, and VM snapshots, are some of the main reasons I stick to Proxmox even when nothing else is running on the machine. (I realize this is slightly wasteful, and a bunch of people will just tell me to run HA in docker, but I really like the simplicity that HAOS offers.) Why do you want to run HAOS on bare metal? better efficiency?
Tangentially: You mention these AAEON industrial PCs, which quite frankly look really cool. Aside from their website, I cannot seem to find anything about them. Where did you get these boxes, and is there a 2nd hand market for them?
The AAEON boards are at https://up-board.org. Like I said I am using the Up Squared boards which are i5 based (among others). There is also little Raspberry Pi sized ones based on the Atom chip. You can get them complete with all aluminum passively cooled cases, very nice actually, on their “up-shop” linked off the website or directly from https://up-shop.org. Also I forget which but one of the Digikey, Newark, Mouser has them as well. If you are in the US and order from Up-Shop (and Europe I assume, elsewhere not sure) they ship from the Netherlands, and pretty fast, maybe 10 days if in stock. The cases also come with a bracket to mount to the back of any monitor with a VESA mount.
As far as putting backups on a 2nd drive, well yea but that’s not a ZFS mirror, and running Proxmox isn’t very efficient unless running it in a container, and then you’re not dealing with the full monty install of HA. Efficiency for me is kinda key, as I have grand plans on the automation front. Virtually everything that is practical to connect in my fairly large hose is connected. I have Zigbee repeating devices covering about every 100 sq ft, and am doing the same with Zwave, plus I have about 2 full Class Cs worth of WiFi devices, which again I have Access Points just about as frequent. The ultimate goal is a house that lies to me, where i can leave everything on, change anything I care to, and when I leave an area of the house HA puts that area into a sort of screensaver mode that I never ever see. When I get even close to that area it comes back to whatever state I left it in. And to be honest the rooms in my house are always pretty busy doing stuff, zoned HVAC, ceiling fans, lots of smart lighting, TVs, surround setups, anyway a lot of effort to be frugal, so I don’t, and pay the price every month.
That being the plan, it needs to work and work reliably. and well I am a High Availability, Disaster Recover Architect by profession so ya know, I kinda feel like I gotta.