Home Assistant

HAHA — Home Assistant High Availability. The acronym was unintentional but too fitting to change. Three Proxmox nodes running Home Assistant, Mosquitto, Zigbee2MQTT, ESPHome, and Node-RED in a Pacemaker cluster, because a smart home that dies when one machine fails isn’t really smart. Overview Aspect Details Nodes 3 Proxmox hosts Clustering Pacemaker + Corosync Storage 3.6TB DRBD dual-primary + OCFS2 Network 2x10Gbps LACP per node Services Home Assistant, Mosquitto, Zigbee2MQTT, ESPHome, Node-RED Technology Stack Clustering Pacemaker + Corosync with STONITH fencing (3-node cluster) Floating virtual IP for seamless failover Quorum-based decision making Storage 3.6TB DRBD dual-primary replication OCFS2 cluster filesystem shared via NFS KINGSTON SFYRD4000G NVMe drives with PCI passthrough Networking LACP etherchannel (2x10Gbps per node) Cisco WS-C3850-12X48U switch Network-attached IoT peripherals (no USB dependencies) Dockerized Services Home Assistant (core automation) Mosquitto (MQTT broker) Zigbee2MQTT (Zigbee gateway) ESPHome (ESP device management) Node-RED (flow-based automation) IoT Peripherals Ethernet Zigbee: TubesZB CC2652P7 Ethernet Bluetooth: Olimex ESP32-POE-ISO USB-free design for clean failover AI Integration Local LLM (Ollama) on RTX 3090 Ti Private voice control and inference No cloud dependency Architecture ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ Floating VIP (Active) │ └───────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────────────────┘ │ ┌───────────────────────┼───────────────────────┐ │ │ │ ▼ ▼ ▼ ┌─────────┐ ┌─────────┐ ┌─────────┐ │ pve01 │ │ pve02 │ │ pve03 │ │ Active │◄─────────►│ Standby │◄─────────►│Arbitrator│ │ │ DRBD │ │ DRBD │ │ └────┬────┘ Sync └────┬────┘ Sync └────┬────┘ │ │ │ │ Corosync Ring │ │ └─────────────────────┴─────────────────────┘ ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ DRBD + OCFS2 + NFS │ │ (3.6TB Replicated Storage) │ └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ │ ▼ ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ Docker Services │ │ ┌──────────────┐ ┌──────────────┐ ┌──────────────┐ │ │ │Home Assistant│ │ Mosquitto │ │ Zigbee2MQTT │ │ │ └──────────────┘ └──────────────┘ └──────────────┘ │ │ ┌──────────────┐ ┌──────────────┐ │ │ │ ESPHome │ │ Node-RED │ │ │ └──────────────┘ └──────────────┘ │ └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ │ ┌──────────────────┼──────────────────┐ ▼ ▼ ▼ ┌─────────────────┐ ┌─────────────────┐ ┌─────────────────┐ │ Ethernet Zigbee │ │Ethernet Bluetooth│ │ Local LLM │ │ TubesZB CC2652P7│ │ Olimex ESP32-POE │ │ RTX 3090 Ti │ └─────────────────┘ └─────────────────┘ └─────────────────┘ What I Got Right (and Wrong) The USB-to-Ethernet migration was the best decision in this project. Zigbee coordinator → TubesZB CC2652P7 (Ethernet), Bluetooth → Olimex ESP32-POE-ISO (Ethernet). USB devices can’t fail over between physical hosts; network devices don’t care which host they’re talking to. Re-pairing dozens of Zigbee devices was painful, but the result is a setup where the smart home stack moves between nodes without caring about peripheral hardware. ...

A whole-house project converting seven IKEA SYMFONISK and Sonos speakers from proprietary systems to Raspberry Pi-based open-source audio players — escaping vendor lock-in while keeping the original hardware intact. Source code & docs: github.com/papadopouloskyriakos/opensymf Why? Sonos ended support for older speakers, stranding them on a frozen S1 platform with no future updates or integration with newer devices. IKEA SYMFONISK speakers, being Sonos-based internally, face the same fate. Rather than accept planned obsolescence, this project replaces the proprietary brains while keeping the original power supplies, speaker drivers, buttons, and LEDs. ...

The problem with smart homes There is a certain irony in building a smart home that becomes useless the moment a single Raspberry Pi decides to fail. I had been running Home Assistant on a standalone VM for years, and while it worked, I found myself increasingly aware of just how fragile the setup was. A failed disk, a corrupted SD card, an unfortunate kernel panic during a firmware update — any of these would leave me fumbling for light switches like it was 1995. ...