Was asked quite a few times how I do my backups with Restic.
For more than 10 years I was using “Duplicity” for backups, but in 2019 I changed to Restic. The main reason for the change was that Duplicity still can’t handle “Big Data”, as in: larger directories. In 2009 someone opened an issue on the Duplicity bugtracker, and this problem still exists as of today. For about two years I was shifting around the problem, excluding files, trying to make the sigfile smaller. But at some point I decided that it is enough and I need to change the tool.
openHAB rules files are lazy loaded. When a rule is used the first time, the entire rule file is loaded and compiled, which apparently is single-threaded and takes a couple seconds. Even on a reasonable powerful Rasperry Pi 4. This happens both after restarting openHAB and after changing the rules file. It also means that whatever the rule in question is supposed to do has to wait a couple seconds when requested for the first time. Imagine you have a light switch, enter a room, press the switch, and it takes 5-10 seconds until the light comes on.
To work around this problem, I add a piece of code in all rules files which triggers an immediate action right after loading the file. This way the rules file is already pre-loaded (which again takes a couple seconds, but likely at a time when the rule is not needed right now).
My plan is to reinstall openHABian on a bigger SDcard, and on a Raspberry Pi 4. The latest release (v1.5) supports the new Pi 4, and I decided it’s time to do a fresh install, and see if all my Playbooks are still working.
As always, I’m searching my shell history for the right command how to install the image … but came up empty.
InfluxDB is running on a Raspberry Pi in my home network (with separate attached disk), and I installed a Grafana on top of it, to visualize crucial data.
For my openHAB system I installed InfluxDB (on a separate) Raspberry Pi. The Pi has a 32 GB SDcard, but that is not enough for storing all the data, and that Pi has additional work to do as well. For that reason I also attached a 1 TB disk to the Pi, and mounted it on /data. Now all I have to do is move the InfluxDB data directory to /data.
Recent openHAB versions come with a new HP Printer Binding, which is a big improvement over the more general IPP Binding for printers.