A while ago someone mentioned “reminders” used in their home audio system, and I took that idea and implemented something similar in openHAB.
The basic idea is that I can send scheduled notifications to any audio sink openHAB is using, possibly more than one audio sink for one message. Also I want to differentiate between a simple audio sound, and text output.
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.
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.
You might know that problem: the brand new SSD in your system is super fast, but after a good time using it, the card is dead. Unlike spinning disks, which usually fail over time, and show I/O errors by blocks, SSD cards are prone to a problem called Wear leveling. Blocks which are written more often will “wear out”, and become unresponsible. More writes increase this risk. And a typical openHAB system does a number of writes all the time: every time an external status changes, it’s written to the event log. By default the syslog is written to disk as well, and then there is a myriad of systemd services, writing status information into files.
Recently I was asked how I do backups of my mobile devices. The discussion started when I told that I “survived” a bricked device without data loss.
Disclaimer: I work (well, was working, before we got spinned of into a subsidiary) for EMC. Part of EMCs portfolio is “backup” and for sure I learned a lot from my employer. All my own devices and servers are backed up, some of them multiple times. Backups, devices and communication is encrypted. I’m not using public services (Dropbox, Google Drive, …) for the backups.