Work in progress: configuration for running a Home Assistant in containers with systemd and podman on Fedora IoT

mattdm · March 9, 2022, 9:43pm

Okay, that has my stumped. If there were a permissions problem, that would have said

stty: /dev/zigbee: Permission denied

dlakelan · March 9, 2022, 9:44pm

I haven’t tried turning it off and on again

mattdm · March 9, 2022, 9:45pm

Yeah, worth a shot. And it’s

serial:
  port: /dev/zigbee

in the zigbee configuration yaml file, right?

dlakelan · March 9, 2022, 9:47pm

$ cat srv/zigbee/configuration.yaml
homeassistant:
  legacy_entity_attributes: false
  legacy_triggers: false
frontend:
  port: 8092
  url: http://gluster2.lan:8092
permit_join: false
mqtt:
  base_topic: zigbee2mqtt
  server: mqtt://10.79.1.33
serial:
  port: /dev/zigbee
advanced:
  homeassistant_legacy_entity_attributes: false
  legacy_api: false
  log_level: debug
  log_output:
    - console
    - file
device_options:
  legacy: false

Turning it off and on again didn’t help.

In the log file:

debug 2022-03-09 21:47:09: Using zigbee-herdsman with settings: '{"adapter":
{"concurrent":null,"delay":null,"disableLED":false},"backupPath":"/app
/data/coordinator_backup.json","databaseBackupPath":"/app/data
/database.db.backup","databasePath":"/app/data/database.db","network":{"channelList":
[11],"extendedPanID":
[221,221,221,221,221,221,221,221],"networkKey":"HIDDEN","panID":6754},
"serialPort":{"path":"/dev/zigbee"}}'

so it shows the serialPort path is /dev/zigbee.

dlakelan · March 9, 2022, 9:51pm

Damn it! it seems so CLOSE!

mattdm · March 9, 2022, 9:53pm

Hmmm. Zigbee2MQTT fails to start | Zigbee2MQTT (from your error message) suggests:

podman exec -it zigbee /bin/sh -c 'test -w /dev/zigbee && echo success || echo failure'

as a test — my stty test just makes sure you can read and this tests write access. Should return success…

dlakelan · March 9, 2022, 9:55pm

homeassistant@gluster2:~ $ podman exec -it zigbee /bin/sh -c 'test -w /dev/zigbee && echo success || echo failure'
success

mattdm · March 9, 2022, 9:55pm

Ooh, wait: from Supported Adapters | Zigbee2MQTT

If Zigbee2MQTT fails to start, try adding the following to your configuration.yaml
serial:
 adapter: deconz

(That is, add adapter: deconz to the existing serial: section.)

dlakelan · March 9, 2022, 9:57pm

YIPEE!
now it’s doing:

...
info  2022-03-09 21:56:49: zigbee-herdsman started (resumed)
info  2022-03-09 21:56:49: Coordinator firmware version: '{"meta":{"maintrel":0,"majorrel":38,"minorrel":88,"product":0,"revision":"0x26580700","transportrev":0},"type":"ConBee2/RaspBee2"}'
debug 2022-03-09 21:57:01: Zigbee network parameters: {"channel":11,"extendedPanID":"0xdddddddddddddddd","panID":6754}
info  2022-03-09 21:57:01: Currently 0 devices are joined:
info  2022-03-09 21:57:01: Zigbee: disabling joining new devices.
info  2022-03-09 21:57:01: Connecting to MQTT server at mqtt://10.79.1.33
debug 2022-03-09 21:57:01: Using MQTT anonymous login
info  2022-03-09 21:57:02: Connected to MQTT server
info  2022-03-09 21:57:02: MQTT publish: topic 'zigbee2mqtt/bridge/state', payload 'online'
info  2022-03-09 21:57:02: Started frontend on port 0.0.0.0:8092
info  2022-03-09 21:57:02: MQTT publish: topic 'zigbee2mqtt/bridge/state', payload 'online'

dlakelan · March 9, 2022, 10:23pm

Ok, so I’ve added all my zigbee devices and renamed them in the zigbee2mqtt interface, and HA magically knows about them now (I have no idea how).

However, homeassistant doesn’t stay running. It starts up… stays running for a minute or two, and then dies with:

Mar  9 14:20:43 gluster2 systemd[1164]: Starting Home Assistant Container...
Mar  9 14:20:43 gluster2 podman[4914]: ae01f99733a14661e15d72f9e74421aea32330e1c81c84e02e908005db094a34
Mar  9 14:20:44 gluster2 systemd[1164]: Started libcrun container.
Mar  9 14:20:44 gluster2 podman[4978]: cc99a6d9d7c4efe6998f5192fb76b897ae2c12de28c500eada971e3650d80dbf
Mar  9 14:22:13 gluster2 systemd[1164]: container-homeassistant.service: start operation timed out. Terminating.
Mar  9 14:22:13 gluster2 systemd[1164]: libpod-cc99a6d9d7c4efe6998f5192fb76b897ae2c12de28c500eada971e3650d80dbf.scope: Consumed 21.486s CPU time.
Mar  9 14:22:15 gluster2 systemd[1164]: container-homeassistant.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=111/n/a
Mar  9 14:22:15 gluster2 systemd[1164]: container-homeassistant.service: Failed with result 'timeout'.

mattdm · March 9, 2022, 10:40pm

It knows about them because of MQTT Discovery - Home Assistant
Hmmm. Anything in home-assistant.log?

dlakelan · March 9, 2022, 11:27pm

2022-03-09 23:26:14 WARNING (Recorder) [homeassistant.components.recorder.util] The system could not validate that the sqlite3 database at //config/home-assistant_v2.db was shutdown cleanly
2022-03-09 23:26:14 WARNING (Recorder) [homeassistant.components.recorder.util] Ended unfinished session (id=75 from 2022-03-09 23:24:14.615788)
2022-03-09 23:26:25 ERROR (SyncWorker_0) [homeassistant.components.dhcp] Cannot watch for dhcp packets: [Errno 1] Operation not permitted

dlakelan · March 9, 2022, 11:33pm

The home assistant container service file has:

[Unit]
Description=Home Assistant Container
Wants=network-online.target
After=network-online.target
RequiresMountsFor=%t/containers
Wants=container-zwave.service
Wants=container-zigbee.service
After=container-zwave.service
After=container-zigbee.service


[Service]
Environment=PODMAN_SYSTEMD_UNIT=%n TZ=America/Los_Angeles WATCHDOG_USEC=5000000
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=30
TimeoutStopSec=70
# note: this is using https://github.com/brianegge/home-assistant-sdnotify.
# If not using that, remove this and change --sdnotify=container to
# --sdnotify=conmon
#WatchdogSec=60
ExecStartPre=/bin/rm -f %t/%n.ctr-id
ExecStart=/usr/bin/podman run \
                          --cidfile=%t/%n.ctr-id \
                          --cgroups=no-conmon \
                          --rm \
                          --sdnotify=container \
                          --replace \
                          --detach \
                          --label "io.containers.autoupdate=registry" \
                          --name=homeassistant \
                          --volume=/var/local/homeassistant/.homeassistant:/config:Z \
                          --network=host \
                          ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:stable
ExecStop=/usr/bin/podman stop --ignore --cidfile=%t/%n.ctr-id
ExecStopPost=/usr/bin/podman rm -f --ignore --cidfile=%t/%n.ctr-id
Type=notify
NotifyAccess=all

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

I’m not clear on what it should have regarding the --sdnotify settings etc.

I’ve just modified it to =conmon if I understand it correctly that’s the right choice unless I’ve set up some integration inside the home-assistant

mattdm · March 9, 2022, 11:37pm

Hmmm. None of those should be fatal.

The warnings are just because of the previous crash.

DHCI ended up disabling the DHCP integration in the config (done by removing the default_config: line and listing everything you do want manually. According to DHCP Discovery - Operation not permitted · Issue #62188 · home-assistant/core · GitHub, adding --cap-add=CAP_NET_RAW should fix that. (But note that there have been security vulnerabilities that use this capability to break out of containers in the past. Theoretically shouldn’t happen… but DHCP discovery doesn’t really add much in my opinion, so I just left it disabled.)

I wonder if it’s just taking longer to start on the RPi than systemd defaults to? Try putting something like TimeoutStartSec=600 in the systemd config (on the line above TimeoutStopSec).

For sdnotify/conmon: without the watchdog, those options should look just like those for the Zwave, Mosquitto, and Zigbee containers. Basically the whole podman command line down to --name should be identical.

dlakelan · March 9, 2022, 11:39pm

ok, by doing --sdnotify=conmon it seems to be starting and staying up!

I’ve figured out how to get to the zigbee UI, how do I get to the zwave UI so I can start discovering my devices etc?

mattdm · March 9, 2022, 11:40pm

Same IP address, port 8091.

dlakelan · March 9, 2022, 11:51pm

Ok, opened the port, am connected. trying to add some devices… It shows me:

This probably doesn’t seem optimal. What next?

Never mind, I figured out from here: Z-wave js network key

dlakelan · March 10, 2022, 12:42am

Hmm… it doesn’t seem to be doing MQTT discovery in the same way for zwave… I’ve paired the devices… but don’t see them in HA.

mattdm · March 10, 2022, 2:01am

Ooh, I was going to say “this is getting into general setup questions”, but actually there is something key which is important to my setup! It’s actually the recommended approach (from others on this forum), but is a little surprising — despite the name “zwavejs2mqtt”, the setup doesn’t actually use MQTT for Zwave

Instead, it uses a dedicated websockets connection on port 3000. (See -p 3000:3000 in the config — and note that it doesn’t require the mosquitto container or enable connections to the container localhost network with --network=slirp4netns:allow_host_loopback=true as the zigbee container config does.)

So, whatcha want to do here is: in the Settings GUI for zwave, find “Home Assistant”, and make sure WS Server is On, and set to port 3000. Optionally, you can disable MQTT Gateway — because we don’t have the network set up for it, that’s not working anyway, and despite what it says about “use only as control panel”, the Home Assistant websockets server takes care of that.

Once you have done that, go back to Home Assistant and enable the Z-Wave JS integration. That should make everything work.

dlakelan · March 10, 2022, 2:08am

Great will give it a try tomorrow. Yeah once everything is being seen in home assistant then I’m good with the rest of setup. I just don’t really have any understanding of how the containers fit together.

Is it possible to use MQTT on the zwave stuff? I kinda like the idea of having one interface for all the devices