My multi-part guide on setting up Home Assistant on a Dell PowerEdge R420 running CentOS 7.
Prologue
At the end of last year my workplace was moving offices and as such was culling unnecessary items before the move. One of the things they were disposing were 2015 Dell PowerEdge R610 and R40 servers. I snatched them up in an instant.
After I got these heavy beasts home the next question was what to do with them? The hard drives were removed so the first point of call was to get replacements. I decided to get a cheap 1Tb hard drive for the R610 (which supports 2.5” bays) but some bad search results from the computer part supplier website made me order a 3.5” drive instead. This was fortunate as the R420 is smaller and lighter than the R610. I also transferred the memory from the R610 into the R420, which happen to be of the same type, for a total of 24Gb!
I began getting the R420 up and running by installing Ubuntu 18.04, my default Linux OS, but ran into issues getting the network interface working. Dell’s website says that Ubuntu 10.04 is officially supported on the R610 but nothing about R420. So I switched to running CentOS 7, which is supported.
Shortly after getting the R420 up and running my Home Assistant instance, running on a Raspberry Pi 3, became corrupted. I managed to salvage the config files but the OS was unrecoverable. I took this as an opportunity to move Home Assistant onto the R420.
Initially I wanted to run Kubernetes on the R420 but that seemed too difficult given it’s meant to run in a cluster. I switched to using Docker Swarm and in the beginning things were starting out well but I was soon becoming annoyed at the leg work required to get every application setup and running. It was at this point that I noticed that Home Assistant (previously Hassio) can be installed ad-hoc. This was one of the reasons I had Home Assistant running on the Raspberry Pi, was for it’s super simple container management and update mechanism. It was decided, this was the direction I am going to take.
Preparation
Before you begin I strongly recommend you setup LVM. I initially did not nor
realised CentOS installed and setup LVM to allocate 95% of my storage to /home
and everything else to /. It wasn’t long until issues appeared and I had to
resize and remap partitions.
My filesystem setup looks something like:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs 12G 0 12G 0% /dev
tmpfs 12G 0 12G 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 12G 250M 12G 3% /run
tmpfs 12G 0 12G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mapper/centos-root 50G 2.3G 48G 5% /
/dev/sda2 1014M 290M 725M 29% /boot
/dev/sda1 200M 12M 189M 6% /boot/efi
/dev/mapper/centos-home 10G 33M 10G 1% /home
/dev/mapper/centos-docker 100G 4.7G 96G 5% /var/lib/docker
/dev/mapper/centos-hassio 500G 25G 476G 5% /usr/share/hassio
You should definitely partition /var/lib/docker, but I also recommend you
partition /usr/share/hassio (or wherever you install Home Assistant). This is
because some addons can use a lot of space, like mine did.
If you plan to simply extend the default volume centos then you can do:
# Create the logical volumes. You can change "100G" to any other value. I
# recommend no less than 50G.
$ sudo lvcreate --name docker -l 100G centos
$ sudo lvcreate --name hassio -l 100G centos
# Format the newly created volumes
$ sudo mkfs.xfs /dev/centos/docker
$ sudo mkfs.xfs /dev/centos/hassio
# Create the folders which we'll use as the mount points in the next step
$ sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/docker /usr/share/hassio
The next step is to update /etc/fstab by adding the following lines:
/dev/mapper/centos-docker /var/lib/docker xfs defaults 0 0
/dev/mapper/centos-hassio /usr/share/hassio xfs defaults 0 0
The final step is just to mount the new volumes:
$ sudo mount /var/lib/docker
$ sudo mount /usr/share/hassio
Now you’re thinking with logical volumes!
Installation
To install Home Assistant (formally known as Hassio) we’re going to perform a “supervised” installation on CentOS 7. I won’t go into detail on how to install and configure the OS but will assume you have a working setup ready. I followed the official instruction (which have now become unsupported).
To kick things off we need to install Docker. Following the official Docker installation guide run the following commands:
$ sudo yum install -y yum-utils
$ sudo yum-config-manager --add-repo https://download.docker.com/linux/centos/docker-ce.repo
$ sudo yum install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io
Next we install the remaining dependencies except for apparmor-utils as CentOS
7 doesn’t support AppArmor and instead uses SELinux.
$ sudo yum install -y jq curl avahi-daemon dbus
network-manager is
already installed on CentOS which says us the hassle of configuring that as our
network manager.
We are now ready to install Hassio:
$ curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/home-assistant/supervised-installer/master/installer.sh | sudo bash -s -- -m qemux86-64
If things succeed then you should have a running instance located at
/usr/share/hassio. You should be able to verify by checking Docker processes.
$ sudo docker ps
CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES
eb88143aa7c5 homeassistant/amd64-hassio-audio:14 "/init" 5 hours ago Up 5 hours hassio_audio
323f3b2a0c99 homeassistant/amd64-hassio-dns:9 "/init coredns -conf…" 5 hours ago Up 5 hours hassio_dns
61ca18fe23d3 homeassistant/amd64-hassio-multicast:2 "/init" 5 hours ago Up 5 hours hassio_multicast
9cc6347226f6 homeassistant/amd64-hassio-cli:25 "/init /bin/bash -c …" 5 hours ago Up 5 hours hassio_cli
cc8cff4de4f9 homeassistant/qemux86-64-homeassistant:0.109.6 "/init" 8 days ago Up 3 hours homeassistant
6a5bf40f38cc homeassistant/amd64-hassio-supervisor "/init" 11 days ago Up 5 hours hassio_supervisor
Configuration
After getting Home Assistant up and running the next step was to configure it again. I figured I’d start from scratch rather than importing my previous installation. First things first is to install some addons! That is the whole point of endeavour after all.
The first addon to install is the File Editor. Whilst I actually installed it via the web UI, this is the command to run if you wish to install via the terminal.
ha addons install core_configurator
The next thing to install, that I highly recommend, is MariaDB so Home Assistant can store all state history. If you’re like me and have many devices you most likely will have a lot of history and performing lookup en masse can be quite slow using the default SQLite database.
ha addons install core_mariadb
Then add the following to your configuration.yaml:
recorder:
db_url: mysql://homeassistant:homeassistant@core-mariadb/homeassistant?charset=utf8
The MariaDB addon defaults the credentials to homeassistant, so if you change
them you’ll need to change them here too. Every addon has a unique ID which is
also used internally for DNS. core-mariadb is the DNS name for the MariaDB
addon container.
Non-core addons will be prefixed with a unique hash related to the origin repo
name instead of core. For more information on addon networking please read the
developer addon
guide.
Up next
This wraps up Part 1. In the next installment I’ll go into detail on adding custom addons and addon repos and other customisations.