Well, I’m not sure what you mean by ‘simple ssh access’. I’m not sure how exactly ssh is setup on hassos, but you need to connect to your host (rpi) over ssh, and then switch to root user if it’s not already. From that guide it looks like they did not set up a password and only allow access with authorized keys… well, it’s good for security but I don’t think it’s worth it unless you expose ssh port to wan.
You don’t need to connect to container’s ssh, just the host, and edit fstab on the host. Whatever you do, you don’t need to do anything inside any of hassio containers, unless its something very temporary. Changes made inside containers are not persistent.
If you’re gonna just use it on linux only then it’s better to format it with ext4, ntfs has some quirks and permission issues on linux, will just save you from some pain down the road. Or at least fat32, but not sure about it
2-3-4 yes
You can use blkid command to display your disks and their UUIDs and /dev/sdX paths, and it’s probably better to use UUID to mount it instead of /dev/sdX path.
Now that I see how hard they made it all on HassOS I think that they should really just put in a config value to change log path, lol. I’m so glad I run it on generic Debian VM.
Hell I think you’d be better off just installing Debian on your RPI and running hass.io install script I linked earlier. Then you’ll have easy ssh access, you’ll be able to install Webmin to have a GUI for server administartion, and you’d be able to format and mount flash driver through Webmin. Even better you can install ubuntu or debian with Desktop and do it all from there.
And that’s where i always loose it
Hassio “simple” ssh only has several commands you can use, and i doubt it will let you edit any files.
As for going the debian-> hass-io it seems like too much of a pain to do it compared to straightforward hassio installation.
I’ll need someone already on hassio to walk me through it step by step, until then, ill keep depending on amazon.
Going by what happens when HA is unable to write to the dB due to a corruption, (have seen many instances of this) it continues operating, logging an error in the HA log for each failed write.
Well, not to panic Just approach it step by step and it’s much easier than you’d think. It’s always scary to see when you see a long list of instructions, but if you just give it some more time it’s much easier I’ll try to make it simple here.
Part 1 - Going Ubuntu
So first of all I’d like to address the “it’s less straightforward” thing. It’s not. It’s almost the same. What you need to do is:
Get monitor and keyboard ready, you’ll need them for the first run
Go to official raspberrypi website and see what OSes are readily available for flashing. https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/ Go for Ubuntu MATE if you’d like to connect Monitor and Keyboard and Mouse to RPI and set it all up this way. Go for Ubuntu Server if you’d like to administer it remotely.
Flash it on an SD Card using the same approach you did with HassOS - Win32DiskImager or balenaEtcher or whatever works for it. They have instructions here: Raspberry Pi | Ubuntu MATE
Connect monitor and keyboard to your Pi. Insert SD card. Power on.
Go over the install wizard where you create user and password
First step done.
Step 1.1. Install and setup SSH
SSH is not enabled by default, you need to install it using sudo apt install openssh-server. It will run on port 22 by default, and you will be able to login with your user and password. Do not port forward this outside of your lan for security purposes.
Log into your Ubuntu terminal over SSH or just open “Terminal” app if you’re using desktop.
To run commands with admin privilegies on ubuntu you use sudo prefix or you can log into root account using sudo su command.
If you’d like to have a web UI to administer your RPI host you can use Webmin. It’s web panel that has the most features among anything I could find, alternatives being Ajenti or Cockpit, they all lack something. You can use webmin to browse filesystem, edit text files, format and partition disks, mount disks, control services and much much more.
To install Webmin you can follow Debian instructions (Ubuntu is derivative of Debian): Downloading and Installing | Webminjust make sure to run the dependency installation command first. They messed the order up in instructions On purpose I suppose, but anyway.
And there you go. You now have full control over your host and you’re not limited by anything hassOS does. I’ve been running it like this on a Debian VM for about a year now, no issues with updates or any important addons. Some addons dont work, sure, but those are like SSH addon… Why do you need an SSH addon if you can connect to your host without it? Other addons like MQTT, nginx, etc should all work fine with this method of installation.
PART 2 - Sticking with HASSOS
I started to write it up but then double checked the guide you linked, it should actually keep you covered on how to connect to HassOS host over SSH.
First step and task here is to get SSH access and be able to edit fstab file. For that you’ll need to run command nano /etc/fstab or sudo nano /etc/fstab and see if it works.
I’m starting to get a feeling that HassOS may be stripped down so much that it all might just be impossible to do after all. If they don’t include text editor like nano or vim or something AND dont include any package manager (like apt) then it’s just not worth it at that point and… Well, HassOS should then just die I suppose. Maybe when Hass is at 1.0 and all can be controlled through UI it might work, but not now.
Conclusion
I guess that what I can summarize after looking into this a bit more is that HassOS should only be used for very light installations and maybe initial look into Hass. It MUST be then replaced with some other installation method like the one described above. It may require additional steps and some learning curve to it, but it’s well worth it in the long run.
I hope they will resolve all these issues, like making adjustments to logging and db so it won’t bog SD card down, maybe modifying OS to log to RAM instead and dump it to file system once in a while, but not constantly? Maybe doing something with database so it only logs certain things by default, like sensors, and you need to enable everything else. Or just advising users to use some other Pi alternative, and not RPI. As much as I love RPI and use it for different projects - it’s not a good home for hass.
Disclaimer
This is all just my personal opinion, I’m not associated with Home assistant devs in any way, I’m just a long time user of hass with a modest hass system, linux amateur and tinkerer, who happens to run a Proxmox server with like two dozen services on it. I only entered linux like 3-4 years ago myself. But just can’t stop falling down this rabbit hole.
This whole thing get me wondering if we could use a in-memory database so there’s no need to touch the SD card. And surprise, surprise! It seems that sqlite can use/create a database in memory only. See this. If this works as expected we should see a improvement in SD life and speed at the cost of losing the history every time you restart HA (sounds good to me ).
Thanks for taking the time to write it up! and at least clearing up that it cant be done on hassio.
I guess ill give the Ubuntu solution a try one morning next week with clear head.
Trhee quick questions that come in mind:
Would the hassio over ubuntu solution be a lot heavier on the RPi than just hassio?
Couldnt i just run the ubuntu from a usb hdd/ssd hooked on the rpi in the first place to avoid the sd issues?
Since i would have a full operating system, couldnt i also host an sql (LAMP or something) on it and use that alongside with hassio?
I actually did not even look into whether there’s an option to change the db path, assuming that multiple people claiming there isn’t looked for it already. Well, seems it was a mistake on my end Great thing, so there IS db path after all
But then there’s another issue - how to mount a USB drive in HassOS?
I need to correct myself on that, it seems you can change db_path in it, so there’s just one thing to find out - how to mount a usb drive
That said - you may not see much of a difference between sqlite and mysql\mariadb in terms of performance in this usecase. sqlite is very light and fast, and it’s only issue is that it does not support multiple clients writing to db very well. So if it’s only used by hass then it should be fine. As long as it’s not on sd card So i’d say until it gets to 500MB+ you should not worry about it. In the end even mysql database is also just a single file, there’s not magic there.
Yeah I know. I’m sorry for sounding so harsh, I was feeling sarcastic at that point. It’s just that it lacks some very useful features, and I feel like it’s better (at this point) to run hass on a more general purpose\server distro. That said even some router firmwares have text editors and sometimes even package manager. So I see why it may not need package manager, but IMO it should have at least a text editor.
Not so sure about that. There’s evidence that mysql\mariadb has better performance. As my setup grows with more sensors/stuff I saw a increase in response time of the history graphs. Mysql solved that for the same hardware (not pi and not SD). Later I moved to postresql as mysql has it’s own quirks.
For small setups sqlite is ok, but you know how addictive HA can be :-).
Hence my remark about roughly 500MB size Yes, for a bigger db it’s better to use something else.
Yeah
EDIT
I mean no. Why do you need ntfs or exfat? You can use ext4. It may be tricky formatting it from windows, but I think there are tools that can do that.
Since quite a long time I only boot from the SD-card. The rest is on an external HD. I think I would recommend that to anyone running something that writes much to disk on a RPi.
I must say I love RPIs. RPI with an external (SSD) drive is a way to go for any RPI server deployment. I used to have an z-way stack running on rpi that produced many SD log writes rendering the RPI unstable, corrupting the SD etc. Once I moved the whole filesystem to a cheap sata SSD in an USB enclosure, alll problems were gone. On the top of that the general performance increase of RPI was immense alhough still on USB. It’s not that involving to move the filesystem to an external drive at all notably on RPI3. There are loads of tutorials out there. It’s definitely worh to try.
I too purchased one of these however, it is not for HA. That is running as a docker image on a thinkserver. I have multiple PI’s running various functions in my home automation domain but HA will not be one of them. For “production” type applications and in particular database applications an SD card just doesn’t cut it.
My m.2 adapter is for a totally different project.
Processor cache for this device is smaller than a RPi so it will be slower when performing SQL lookups. FYI. I.E. RPi is better for HAs database. Just did some research on this no too long ago.
Just approach it step by step and it’s much easier than you’d think. It’s always scary to see when you see a long list of instructions, but if you just give it some more time it’s much easier 
I’ll try to make it simple here.
On purpose I suppose, but anyway.
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