I entered in to the HA world last January and love it. mostly. I have had multiple very frustrating reliability issues that I cant seem to solve. I could really use someone else’s input on where I am going wrong.
Here is the deal:
I began with HA on Virtualbox. It worked great but there was one very annoying problem with it. I use the HUSBZB-1 stick with it and every time the PC had to restart HA lost connection with the HUSBZB-1 device. The only fix is to restart HA. Normally this would not be a problem, but, I have a terrible memory and the number of times my family yelled at me because the lights weren’t working got old.
So I switched to a Pi 4. That seemed to go fine for awhile, I would say two months or so. Then reliability issues kicked in. Every day or two everything would slow way down or even stop working. I only noticed this with ZHA devices but it could be others too. We would press a button and the light would not come on for 10 seconds or so OR would go on then off immediately as if we pressed it twice (sometimes 3 or 4 times!). Restarting my Pi fixed the issue for like a day, maybe 2. When I monitor “debugging” in NodeRed I will hit a button and nothing will show up for 5+ seconds regularly, then the actions would trigger instantly. So it seems like it is “reading inputs” slowly and not slow to “output” if this makes sense
I read that the slowing could have been due to the SD card beginning to fail. I am not sure if it was true or not but I had a spare fresh SD card so I switched of to that and gave it a go. Same thing happened here, thus I am confident it is not my SD card.
So then I thought meh, try switching to an external SSD. That was quite the pain to get setup right but I did eventually succeed, sort of. I have determined that I have a power issue (I think) with using the Pi, HUSBZB-1 stick, and SSD. I am going to power the SSD externally but I have to wait for the adapter.
In the mean time I decided to switch back to virtualbox, as back then, it was working fine other than the restart issues. But to my dismay my reliability problems are now present in my virtualbox setup as well! I never had the slow down issue but now I do. And I still have the restart issue.
This leaves me to think one of two things (I think). Either I have some issue with my HA setup, maybe something I did or added or changed between the original VM setup to the pi went wrong? Or maybe my HUSBZB-1 stick is going bad? I have been migrating snapshots everytime I switch rather than “starting over” which I really hope to avoid. I have a lot of devices and lots of stuff setup well in Nodered, etc.
I honestly have no clue how to solve this. I have searched a bunch but nothing seems to work or be similar to my issue. I have dedicated days many times on this and I am losing steam. My family has lost patience quite some time ago.
Also - I have a dedicated PC server running OMV. It is a powerful machine and it literally is always on. I would love to put HA on that but everything I find on how to do that is either older and seemingly not doable now (such as OMV 4 allowing VM and OMV 5 not) or I just cannot get to work right (tried supervised with Debian install). I am good with installing dockers but the only success I have with docker does not support supervisor which is not going to work for me.
I have a bunch I have up there and it is really a few not related issues but has me in a place where I cannot figure out what to do. I am at my ends wit!