This is a pretty out there question but I setup a Nomad cluster on a few Raspberry Pi’s. This is for learning how to use Nomad, Consul, Vault, etc. (Hashicorps answer to Kubernetes which I find very compelling and much easier to use). Nomad uses Docker, typically, under the covers for managing apps. Home Assistant, having a Dockerized option, would work well here - except, I don’t know if/how I can pin HA to the specific Pi that would have my Z-Wave stick connected to it and thought I’d ask here.
Having to pin it to a Pi kinda negates the benefit of Nomad but still gives me something practical to use it and it’s an excellent way to manage Docker containers.
That gives me a TON to consider! I don’t need high availability as much as simplifying my NAS a bit (I’m using LXC containers to run various things, including Home Assistant) and just for something to do while being stuck inside all day given current events. My Home Assistant install is pretty long in the tooth as well - I just now finally got my config in a git repo and switched to having HA largely handle my Z-Wave config (I was using open-zwave-control-panel but I can no longer get it working).
I didn’t know socat or USB-over-IP were even options, that’s really cool! Likewise I didn’t think about just copying the config across sticks. That is very clever.
I am still thinking of using my NAS (an Ubuntu powered Atom solution) for persistent storage (it’ll run MySQL, MQTT, etc.). I even thought about using netboot for the Pi cluster. So having it also manage the USB stick probably isn’t a huge deal, though on the other hand sometimes the USB bus just junks out on my NAS and I have to restart the whole thing. That’d be easier to mess with if I could just restart the offending Pi node.
Hmm…lot’s to now ponder! Thanks again for that info - super helpful!