I am becoming the HA guru of my family and friends, probably like much of you are as well. My parents really like the features of it, but I can’t visit them very often because of the distance. I intent to install HAOS on a thin client for them, can I prepare everything beforehand so I don’t have to sit around all day provisioning all zigbee devices and creating dashboards? Also, how are you managing multiple installations? Do you ask all your friends / family to have a nabu casa subscription so you can log in remotely?
HA sets up DNS and time zones, maps, devices on the network, lots of stuff based on where it is loaded, so I would wait, or you have a lot of manual futzing anyway. You can download and install the file on the drive or vm or whatever you are using, but don’t start HA until you get there.
Damn, that’s not goodnto hear. I need to prepare a ha installation that goes to Italy and I was aiming in setting up a green with tailscale or NABU casa and now you’re saying that’s a challenge
Won’t matter ZWave and Zigbee devices should really be paired I place so you dont end up with a completely nonunctional mesh. If you try to prep the ahead of time you will very likely lose routers when they’re installed so you’ll have to manually repair the mesh anyway by re-adding the devices…
Asking for folks to subscribe to Nabu casa is definitely a good way to get access to the system remotely and also to help fund development. If for some reason, folks balk at that, then if you don’t have a domain of your own that has an API for updating entries, you could look at the Cloudflare setup or you could do something with Tailscale. I use that to private access my various instances. Even helps when something goes a little sideways and they have internet connectivity but for some reason their DNS hasn’t been properly updated so that I can get the correct info and update the DNS entries so I have full functionality again.
OK thanks for all the replies. Can I install HAOS up to the point where it needs the network? It would be nice if I can do the rest of the installation on site headless, so I only need to bring a laptop and not also a display and keyboard.
You can build out HAOS all the way to having a working device. Just don’t go accepting any local devices that it discovers.
I recently did something like this for a client that wanted help setting up an HAOS device. They had the device shipped to me, I configured it, and shipped it back. It was configured with Tailscale on it in a Tailnet that both I and the client have access to. Additionally, we have a Zulip instance that we have an HA bot setup in to announce shutdown / restart events using this blueprint. I got all of this configured before sending the device back to them and them putting it on their network.
With something like all of that in place, you’ll know when the device is up and talking the network at a point where you can get to it remotely using Tailscale
