I feel like I’m so close to running a high-availability Home Assistant setup with a USB Z-Wave stick but there’s just one problem.
I have a Proxmox cluster with HASSOS running on one of the nodes. I also have a Raspberry Pi which has been setup to serve my Z-Wave USB stick over ser2net. So far, so good.
My issue is that my HASSOS install seems to be extremely locked down and appliance-like (which is the idea I guess) but that means that I cannot get something like usbip or socat installed in HASSOS to act as a client for the Z-Wave USB stick. This, in turn, means that HASS High Availability cannnot be achieved as Proxmox (and most hypervisors from what I understand) are unable to migrate virtual machines with local hardware passthrough.
Any ideas would be really welcome. Is there anything possible in HASSOS itself to receive a USB-over-IP Z-Wave dongle? Should I consider moving away from HASSOS to one of the other install methods that allows me to easily install tools such as socat or usbip?
I’ve only done Zigbee2MQTT so far, but that was just follow some basic instructions (half a dozen steps) installing the package, and running it up. And once the software is running HA just finds all the Zigbee devices through MQTT. Was probably one of the least painful things I’ve done. Zwave2MQTT is the next cab off the rank (I’m still using the native Zwave interface at the moment).
I’ll mark this as the the solution as it actually worked! However other aspects of socat getting wiped in restart and just not being able to make it work past the initial install step meant that this approach seemed to flaky so I’ve abandoned it.
I think I’m going to try the Zwave2MQTT suggested earlier as that has other attractive aspects (such as decoupling my large ZWave network from HA, etc. I have some questions in relation to Zwave2MQTT, which I’ll post in a separate thread.
I am looking to do the same thing. I have a hassio vm on a Proxmox server with a Homeseer Z-Net device (basically a Pi with a built in Z-Wave stick that uses ser2net to talk to Homeseer).
I’m thinking of moving to HA and want to have my hassio VM talk to the Z-Net device. My thought was to configure socat on the PVE host and expose it to the hassio VM. I haven’t tried this yet and wanted to see if you made any more progress before attempting.
The reason why I didn’t get it working was because it is not possible to install and configure the required packages on hassio to get a remote Z-Wave stick appliance to work. The commands suggested by @nickrout did work in that I managed to install socat but then I could not manage to configure socat and get it it work properly to connect to my remote Z-Wave “server”.
So here’s what did work:
I backed up my hassio installation (using the snapshot feature in Home Assistant, not the Proxmox backup/snapshot feature)
Now I have a plain Linux VM so can install other required tools to get remote Z-Wave to work
I could not succesfully get socat to work for some reason. It created a /tty/ACM0 “device” on my new HA VM but HA refused to detect that device existed. So I went with the USBIP method
The USBIP method worked perfectly. /tty/ACM0 created and detected by HA as a Z-Wave modem. Success!!
I then restored by HA snapshot created earlier from within HA itself
End result: 1) HA sees the remote Z-Wave stick (running on a RPI) as a local device; 2) I don’t need to have local USB device passthrough to Proxmox; 3) this means I can do live HA (Home Assistant) migration between my two Proxmox nodes with zero downtime - so true HA (High Availability) is achieved; 4) the HA (Home Assistant) snapshot feature was amazing in compeletely restoring my system & all configuration. Given I have a fairly extensive HA install that controls every aspect of our house, it was a bit of a leap of faith and I was very happy it was a seamless restore.
I’m moving from Homeseer to HA, so I’m installing a new instance of HA. I now currently have it running in a Debian 10 VM.
I’ll probably try to get socat working since I have a Z-NET device and it runs that natively. I’d have to hack into it to get USBIP configured, but will try that if socat fails.
But it is cool this works since my Proxmox server isn’t in an ideal location for a Z-Wave stick.
I think plenty of others had success with the socat method so you should be fine. I really just couldn’t be bothered troubleshooting it any more as I’ve already spent many hours trying to get hassio to work with socat.
I’m running zwave2mqtt (and zigbee2mqtt) on a separate machine using docker which is really, really ideal. If I need to upgrade either I just have to manipulate the container and getting it started was just like 123 because once you’ve worked out the correct command to start your docker it is done.
