Heads up for people running Arch updating to 2023.10.3

Installation
1

So I just updated my HASS installation using pacman -Syu, and it wouldn’t start after reboot. Turns out something about the dependency installation has changed and it kept timing out after a little while every time.

I think I’ve solved this by adding TimeoutStartSec=infinity to the service file (or actually /etc/systemd/system/home-assistant.service.d/override.conf, so I don’t need to modify the actual service file).

This is probably not a good option in the long run, because if the service actually hangs, systemd won’t know about it, but I guess the timeout override can be removed once dependencies have been installed…

Update: it also seems to need more /tmp/ space than the default configuration provides. I just unmounted /tmp/ completely so it goes directly on my root partition and see what happens.

2

Now I’m still having some numpy issue. It doesn’t find the global one installed by pacman, and if I install it in the venv it complains that shouldn’t be imported from source directory. Hopefully I can solve this soon…

Update: had to do another modification to the service-file. I added --system-site-packages to the line that upgrades the venv - without this it wouldn’t find the globally installed numpy, and a venv installed one just refused to work. Let’s hope this does the trick, looks promising so far.

Update2: Nope, didn’t work. Now I decided to try creating a .venv, to get rid of all the old stuff that might interfere. So let’s hope that does the trick. At least it’s now been doing its’ thing for a long time without errors…
I reverted the service file to defaults, just keeping that timeout setting in the override file.

Ok, now the /tmp/ apparently got mounted again for whatever reason and ran out of space again. So now I increased its’ size to 5G, let’s hope that’ll work now.

Update3: I don’t know anything about anything anymore… It seemed like everything was broken, then after a few extra restarts etc, all of a sudden everything seems to work again. Maybe intialization just took a few starts to get through and fix all the errors?

I was mostly worried because I googled and people seemed to be having much MQTT issues, and that’s my main use case in HASS… But thankfully that started working along with everything else after I did all that messing around.

Anyway, what I immediately noticed in this new version is that my cameras work significantly better now! Me like! In the previous version I had to wait close to a minute before the video stream would start after clicking, now it’s almost instant. Very very nice.

And also now the calendar view actually opens! In 2023.5.1 and prior it would just completely freeze whatever client I was trying to access it on.

So definitely a nice improvement overall…