One of these days…


…when everything goes wrong. Late last night the Home Assistant app in my phone started to not answer. The reason behind this error? Well, the Home Assistant computer had failed. Maybe no surprise as it is built of old stuff I found in my shelf. Some investigation this morning gave that there were read errors on the disk, probably it is worn out. And it deserves retirement, it’s an old IDE drive from 2007. After some thinking and fiddling it was replaced by another disk found in the shelves, this time a SATA drive from 2013. Luckily the old disk wasn’t completely dead, and I could use dd to copy the files between the disks, saving me from reinstalling everything.

The old text says “Good”, the new “Bad”. And that’s ok after 15 years.

The only problem was that the old disk were bigger than the new one, making a direct dd operation impossible. Luckily the root partition was not that big, so I could dd that. The partition for /home on the other hand was bigger, and dd was impossible. Solution? Make a backup of /home with the old disk as system disk. Then swap disks to use the new as system, and restore the backup on a newly created home partition. Easy as that 🙂

Once I mounted the motherboard of a Thin Client in an old DVD-player case. It still works, and now it acts as a server for Home Assistant and as a NAS. The hard disks wouldn’t fit in the case, so they sit in a holder besides the server. Pretty? No. Cheap and environment friendly? Indeed.

At the same time (I always do several things at the same time…) I tried to print my first own design on the 3D printer. But it did fail, and fail again. The first layer was not pretty, and then it all got lose and the print turned into a plastic ball. Bummers.

I cleaned and levelled the bed, over and over. Turned to Facebook for help, levelled and cleaned again. And now I think it sticks, soon the new case for a temp sensor and a bigger battery well be done!


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