Home Assistant Presence Simulation

300+ IP devices. Astounding. Do you mind sharing any details?

Knowing you can survive reboots is positive for stability.

HA is a hell of YAML and more and more things doable only from the WebUI, this means you can't nor automate nor document your setup, so you can't replicate it.

It's a common issue in modern software: devs are so inhabited to use cloud stuff not knowing what's behind they are mentally unable to comprehend why doing so it's a totally absurd thing. Software MUST REPLICATE with easy, your home infra should be replicated from scratch without much more than booting a custom live. You shouldn't need to re-do the same step again. In *nix we have this concept since decades, those from Windows land simply do not understand because replication for them it's a myth.

Give NixOS or Guix System a try and you'll understand: your setup is just a single or few text files, a command read them and generate a new deploy for you. No need to traveling ever changing UIs by hand, no YAML hell.

At another level it's the same for those from stratis/mdraid/lvm/btrfs vs zfs. Zfs is done for the operation, as a storage should be, flexible, simple, effective, the others are a pile of CRAP those who develop them do not even recognize why, because they have no real idea of automation even if they are core devs of some very low level system stuff. Another example: "systemctl status something" is a CLI designed by some who have no idea of the real world needs, otherwise it would be "systemctl something status" because typically when you look for a service status you might want thereafter reload/restart/stop it, if not the word exchange does change nothing to you. These are the sign of devs born on Windows that have never go behind their desktop or someone else cloud service so they have no idea about how to build an infra.

For HA most of it's devs I suppose have no p.v. at home, or they have no personal automation to maximize self-consumption so they do not know how many lines of YAML and wasted time on their UI such design imply. Instead with "dumb end users" in mind, people who NEVER EVER use HA seriously simply because they lack too much knowledge even if someone gives the a ready made system, they focus on "visual code" like Node Red, augmenting them messiness level while still no option exists to establish sensor data retention and pruning, you need aside InfluxDB so another dependency for next to nothing and an issue at a time HA became just a part of a system with NO UI at all because to use InfluxDB you need for instance Grafana and so you entirely replace HA slick UI. In the end you have done A MONSTER to handle simple automation of many stuff due to wrong design ideas, while it could perfectly be a single simple app, HA itself, for instance exposed in python directly.

At some level many start to understand and from UIs they tend to REPL, from disappearing menus to "dashes", from widgets to NotebookUIs for some scientific software, LLM prompts and so on, but even with that most still have to understand a decades old IT principle.

I'm still on HA since as you I have to find a viable alternative, the saddest thing is how many, dev included, do not understand the above rant, do not even have a damn idea what we are talking about...

Yeah “easier nvme” requires buying a $40 hat and a special case with special fan because otherwise they interfere. Which is crazy considering n100 boxes already have an nvme and a fan for ~$100

I wasn't sure. I had some kernel panics that I didn't dig deeply into, and I would sometimes use the image outside the VM to fsck it when HAOS would subsequently not recover.

> I don't see this as being unique to HAOS, if a filesystem is corrupted in a certain way then _no OS_ is going to be able to boot.

Theoretically true if you are very unlucky, however, that's not true at all for the vast majority of filesystem failures.

I am talking about failures where if I inspect the disk image outside the VM and fsck it, everything is fine.

Also, given that HA leans so heavily on docker, it would be a reasonable feature for it to rebuild some docker images should the disk damage them.

Traditional hard disk failures are common, but also, SD card failure is really common. If you've worked on a sufficiently popular mobile app you've probably seen tons of it. It's reasonable to plan for it at the application layer. To say nothing of at an OS layer. There's a very good reason why Unix traditionally ships with fsck tools and sometimes runs them at boot. Whoever designed HAOS not to do this made a big mistake, and I would hit this a few times a year in my old setup.

How’s the power consumption compare? If you don’t need more powerful it might not be the bargain it looks like.

I've been using HA since near the very beginning, and I recommend using the Proxmox Helper Scripts script that installs the HAOS VM. That's what I do. I disagree with the OP, HAOS simplifies a lot of stuff like addon installations, updates, backups, and migrations. It's the main supported way to run Home Assistant now and the one they spend the most time testing. HA is probably the most critical piece of software I run, so I want it to work, and I don't care about also running other stuff on the same system (other than addon's) because I can do that in a separate VM. Having spent years running it bare metal and in docker that certainly works fine, but HAOS made it a lot less effort to manage and has been very reliable when I ran it on a standalone machine and then when I moved it under Proxmox.

The only thing I run into is that when HAOS reboots, or occassionally when I restart the core, the KVM host has a short disconnect of my Zigbee stick.

You can install all of them as stand-alone docker containers.

That's why I try as hard as I can to find either truly "dumb" devices with mechanical switches vs momentary buttons or devices that remember their last state after A/C power is restored. Hard to figure out the second option though without trying it unless a review happens to mention it specifically.

Not much more than just clicking an update button once in a while. But that’s a standard workflow most people are used to. Updating the clock on the standalone timers has to be done using a tiny LCD screen with an esoteric menu system while holding a manual/pamphlet that’s printed in less than 6pt text. It’s not something you do often enough to remember the procedure.

Of course you can make things more complicated if you want to in HA, or you can set it and mostly forget it if you just use timers.

You don't even have to have kids.

When I was at my last house, I didn't have kids, and people would knock on my door every day. It was because my block was full of neighbors who were friendly and nice to one another, and not shut in their houses like hermits.

The way many people in the suburbs live these days, they'd might as well live in windowless metal shipping containers.

Then you will find out when your power goes out?

This would be a dead giveaway that I wasn't home; my cats tend to get the zoomies in the small hours.

My z-wave sensors of various brands tend to recognize my cat. Most of them have a "pet" setting which is supposed to ignore them, but then I would lose my entire security system.