Welcome to today’s daily kōrero!
Anyone can make the thread, first in first served. If you are here on a day and there’s no daily thread, feel free to create it!
Anyway, it’s just a chance to talk about your day, what you have planned, what you have done, etc.
So, how’s it going?
Question for the Home Assistant gurus: I’m considering setting up HA, mostly for some temperature sensors which currently have a (more or less) DIY setup for handling/displaying the data. The sensor data gets sent via MQTT, which I imagine is all good for HA.
I have a Raspberry PI 4, which is our media centre (running OSMC). Does HA run pretty well installed alongside everything else, i.e. not on a dedicated machine? It seems like you can install it via pip (or Docker) rather than its dedicated OS… does that seem like a reasonable approach, since I don’t really want to have another Raspberry PI?
Between yourself and Dave, I’m getting constant reminders to stop procrastinating and get my HA setup. Bought all the kit, but it’s just been sitting for a few months now 😂
I haven’t even finished mine. I got 2 IR blasters that I haven’t set up because they didn’t immedietly work and so I told myself I’d give it another go later (a couple of months ago).
I’m not familiar with OSMC, but my only concern would be with transcoding video using up resources, but I’m guessing it doesn’t as the rPI4 wouldn’t be very powerful for doing that anyway?
Doesn’t really hurt to try and see how you get on. HA can be pretty light if you’re not running a lot of automations and scripts.
Trascoding video on the Pi is pretty much a no-go 😆
Haha thought so, but I haven’t used a Pi in ages!
Lucky you! But one thing that Pi’s are is quiet, something you don’t get with anything much more powerful.
True! I think I only ever used the Pi 2 or 3? Still too underpowered for what I wanted it for back then.
I bought a Pi 1 as soon as they were announced, then it spent nearly a decade in a cupboard (other than some short-lived projects) before I finally found a good use for it. It’s currently running Pi-hole for my home network.
The Pi4 is a lot, lot more powerful. It can run a dozen self hosted services and do just fine, so long as those services are not media-serving. I have found photo or media servers are a bit much for the Pi 4, and I’ve recently moved things across to an old laptop and started looking at doing media related stuff.
That’s a good use. I think back then I wanted it for media and maybe torrenting? I’m stretching my memory here a little, but possibly it had shared bandwidth between the USB bus and Ethernet?? Which made it unsuitable. Ended up selling it later on.
I’ve very new to HA but have been running on a RPi4 without issue. There’s some differences between running on their dedicated OS and running in docker but largely it doesn’t seem to be an issue. No issues with resources.
I’ve gotten back into HA recently and I’m running it in a docker container. It confuses the hell out of me, like how do you access the files that are in the docker container? I can’t work out where they actually are on my system.
I think the main difference between docker and using home assistant OS is that some things, add ons in particular, aren’t available in docker unless you install them manually.
Docker is fantastic but there is definitely a learning curve. I use docker compose for everything, which makes it easier (especially blowing away and recreating a container).
Instead of trying to work out where stuff lives, I create bind mounts. Basically, map a directory on your system to a directory within the container. Most self-hosted services these days will provide docker-compose.yml example files with bind mounts specified, and docker now ships with compose baked in.
I create one directory to hold everything, then one directory to hold a service, then put the docker-compose.yml file in there. Then I can back up just that one directory and everything important is backed up (I do things differently for lemmy because I want live backups, but all my personal stuff is done like that).
Just curious, how do you do live backups for Lemmy?
Two parts. The first part is the important part, the database. I run a scheduled database dump for this (the lemmy documentation actually explains how to do a database dump and how to restore it - I just have a bash script triggered by a cron job).
The second part is the images. Uploaded images and the image cache (for thumbnails for posts on other servers, etc) are virtually impossible to tell apart, so it’s all backed up (about 150GB just for images). For this, I just do a tarball of the whole directory. Any in-progress changes get skipped by the process but my theory is that since images are only added and deleted, if the process was run 30 seconds earlier then any being added would have been missed anyway, so they can wait until tomorrow’s backup. The vast, vast majority are cached images rather than image uploads anyway.
These two things are done overnight NZ time as they can be resource intensive, but I’ve done daylight hour backups before when needed, and it doesn’t cause much of an impact to the site performance anyway.
Yeah, I am not that experienced with Docker, so I may go with installing it via pip.
Thanks, I will probably try to do it that way.