I have probably come around to upgrade beforeš
Well too late now. Got everything up and running last night prior to seeing these responses. Running ubuntu 18.04. Iāll see if I run into these stability issues. Either way, I now have a snapshot and a ubuntu boot flash drive so resetting will be super easy. The process only took 3 hours and thatās because I had to change a few things around with the new hardware. Nothing crazy though. Most of it was waiting and piecing the configuration together. In hindsight I could have just loaded the snapshot because thatās all I really did when transferring over the config piece by piece. I think I ended up updating 2 ip addresses.
Ubuntu server can be very stable. Ubuntu desktop I cannot speak to.
Why run dist upgrades? Just install the security patches and be done with it. I have never had an Ubuntu issue after many years of running it for various use cases.
Yeah, I run many many Ubuntu Server VMs for my organizationā¦We have some that have been in operation since 2014 that barely get reboots. Security patches get applied frequently, and rebooted about once a year.
PS. a dist-upgrade is a very different thing than a release upgrade. 
dist-upgrades are very safe to do, and updates the system to current patch levels for the software you run. release upgrades are dangerous going from major version to major version.
Yeah dist was short for distribution in this case. Dist was a poor choice given that dist-upgrade is something different.
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And now that 18.04 is supported for 10 yearsā¦we donāt even have to worry about that.
It migt be a bit off-topic, but if you want Great recording software for free, and I mean, realy great, you should take a look at Milestone Xprotect.
For free for up to 8 cameraās, almost every cam is supported and has a lot of cool features.
Have tried the shinobi (or something like that), Blue Iris, Synology surveillance station, Netcam Studio, Milestone X Protect just blows them away.
Running on a i5 (Gen 5) CPU with 16 Gb ram (windows 10) + some docker containers.
Mounted my synology using icsi for the recording archive.
The recordings are encrypted, so for the cameraās inside my house it adds a little bit of extra protection.
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Powerful update? Get a Dell PowerEdge R210II. And im not joking, im using it for HA myself
Certainly not for everybody but Iām running Home Assistant from a jail on my FreeNAS, so in my case HA has the power of an Intel Xeon CPU E3-1245 [email protected] (8 cores) and nearly 32 Gigs of RAM
I have a Synology DS218+ which is running 4 cameras and also has a nice docker GUI along with a swag of other features. Had it for about 6 months and have been very happy.
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I am using a NUC i5 and am very happy, but it is not doing video processing. I did install zoneminder and it seemed to use a lot of resources, so I have disabled it.
Running Ubuntu 18.04 server. If I did it again I would probably go for debian. However I have no complaints.
If you are going to use ubuntu, go for a LTS version, that is presently 18.04 or 16.04.
I donāt know what to do with the installer file. It has an exe extension and my server doesnāt know what to do with it.
Where is the source so I can take a look?
Haha, you could install virtualbox, install Windows 10 inside it, and run the file with the exe extension.
milestone is cool, but WAAAAY overkill. It is very similar to the software we run at work (Genetec Security Desk). I ran it in a VM for a while, to test it out, but I could never replace test cameras with real cameras, and they ate up all my free licenses. If you want to license anything beyond the free 8 licenses, it will cost literally hundreds upon hundreds of dollars.
I opted for just having my cameras record everything to their own NFS datastore on my FreeNAS box, and each camera is given 1TB of storage to use. Home Assistant taps into their motion sensors, and feeds so I can use them for automations and front end.
Iām running HA with 646 enitites now, 6 of them is cameras. I upgraded from Raspberry Pi to an old Dell optiplex 7010, as the Raspberry started to feel a bit slow. Not sure about the specs of the Dell computer, as itās an old computer from work. It has an i5 and a designed for W7-sticker, so itās probably from between 2009-2012. It runs Ubuntu 18.04 and HA in Docker. I have also started to run other things on it now, as it has more than enough power (Like UniFi controller in Docker).
The HA container is using about 0.3 to 3% of the CPU on idle. 20-35% when I opened the camera page in Lovelace and peeks at 50% when streaming a camera image. The memory consumption is about 700MB.
My cameras are 6 different cheap camera from China/Hong Kong - so the quality is very variable. I have decided to invest in the Ubiquiti cameras instead, as I already have USG and APās. Just waiting for the Cloud Key Gen2.
I think HA is great to show the status from a camera, like āis the garagedoor upā, but I donāt think itās quite there to use as an NVR yet. Right now Iām running Netcam Studio on a Windows server in addition to HA - but with Ubiquiti I can get it in a dedicated box instead with less maintenance and no license other than the investment.
As for the power consumption mention above, Iām using HA to monitor the power consumption on my computer rig. Itās now pulling 351 W for 4 computers (5 monitors) (The one iām sitting on now, my GF playing CS:GO on the other, The Dell with HA and one in sleep), 2 switches and 3 smarthome boxes (verisure, TrĆ„dfri and Sensibo). Most computers today are so āgreenā that the power consumption should not be an issue.
Thank you for the detailed information! It helped a lot!
Well, it could be a bit too much, depends what you expect to do.
I run a T410 at home (16 cores, RAM, TB of storageā¦), but many things beyond HA run on this.
I have an ESXi on this, with several VM :
- a Nas4Free that centralizes all storage, and also runs Plex. Has lots of CPU to handle the conversions. Not exposed outside
- a āDesktopā, running latest Ubuntu desktop. Used as the download machine mostly and also to test things. Itās the only one where graphical interface is installed.
- a āfrontendā server, running latest Debian. It runs the OpenVPN server and a FTP server. The only machine really exposed outside.
- a āServiceā VM, running latest Ubuntu LTS (18.04.1 as of today) where obviously HA is. Along with Zoneminder, CUPS server, Caldav serverā¦ Except the Zoneminder part, this aināt consuming any CPU nor RAM. So, for HA purpose, a ātraditionalā server is really overkill.
All of this is behind a firewall, in a dedicated zone. Devices used by HA (Xiaomi gateway, 5 chinese cameras, lights, smart plugsā¦) are mostly direct WiFi and are in a dedicated zone too. Users are in another zone.
I still have a lot of resources if I wanted to add objects recognition from cameras for instance.
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Iām running Ubuntu and my current uptime is 175 days, and thats only because I powered it off to run some cables. If using Ubuntu I would recommend the LTS releases.
As for the OPās question on hardware. I have found a NUC to be more than adequate for Home Assistant, cameras, and various other docker containers. Of course it depends how many cameras will be connected, resolution etc.
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DavidFW1960, I havenāt been able to find the site youāre referring to. Can you provide the link? I would like to configure a NUC with docker containers to replace raspberry piās.
On the installation page.