Best hardware platform

@NCO and others interested, I did convert over to Seabios on the chromebox. It solved the kernel update issue, and I’ve had the unit with 20+ days uptime. I have seen issues with crashes and hangs though, but I haven’t had time to investigate the few times it’s happened. Another recent conundrum is with wifi - I’ve seen my router drop and the chromebox doesn’t auto-reconnect. Searches show this isn’t uncommon with ubuntu. My guess is there are driver issues with the wifi chipset. Given those issues and the occasional router / modem hang I’m looking at this: http://resetplug.com/
Going with wired ethernet isn’t an option due to lightning strikes in my area. I’ve already had to replace routers and other components that were directly connected to it. I am beginning to think unless a board is designed to work with linux (i.e. all chipset spec openly available) it will likely have issues.

Were you able to identify the cause of the crashes and hangs?

I am running Openhabian + Mosqito on a RPI3 with an Toshiba 32GB ultra SD card for now about 1.5 years without any issue related to data corruption. eMMC as alternative to SD card makes no difference, this is the same device only as BGA to be soldered to the board.

Not yet, and that unit has been stable for quite a while. I have another
cn60 running lubuntu 17.10 that hung doing some compiles
just this morning. I wish I had time to investigate since these are nice
boxes for the money. I will keep using them
and do a watchdog reboot with the arduino as a failsafe if it becomes a
recurring theme. I’m curious about the Intel NUC
line too. I haven’t searched to see if there are any issues with those
under linux yet.

I recently converted running my home router to LEDE (from an EdgeRouter Lite) on one of these (the i3 one) and it has perform extremely well. I have a bunch of cn60 as OpenElec clients to my central media server and those too have been flawless for years. I ipxe boot those so I usually take out the SSD and put it into its own SATA encloure as boot drives for other things. Yes, I like these chromeboxes a lot and find them very versitile for many purposes and sometimes you can get these for a steal.

I want to run OH2 in my ESXi as a VM though so I can use XSI backups. But I need to have my Z-wave stick on the ground floor in a central location for a good mesh design therefore trying to find the best way to run the z-wave stick and get the info back to the VM.

If I do use the chromebox for an all-in-one solution, I can still backup using dd, but it will be a bit cubersome but doable since it will be placed up (cupboard top) high to keep it out of site.

The good thing with the MrChromebox bios, is that you can boot via USB and use that to backup the SSD and then reboot back to the SSD and resume. With the VM, it is more on-line. I also have the option to boot via ipxe if OH2 supports it easily and backup the LVM on the main server like I do for OpenElec.

Not quite sure which route to go as yet.

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Check out Virtual Here, works with Linux, Synology, Windows. Works with a RFLink, not sure if it would work with the Z-stick. Only 50.00 for unlimited devices on a single server. Allows unlimited clients. The trial will allow you to fully test it out.

Thanks…it is very interesting but a client/server architecture for this simple use-case seems a bit overkill…but, will consider it an option should the ser2net/socat not work out reliably.

Seems like a server client setup with ser2net/socat

Yes, working good so far. Not a separate server (product) required. Just a simple utility. Minimal requirements and resources. Using systemd to keep it connected. Had an old Beaglebone Black that I put Debian Stretch 1GB on its eMMC with the z-wave stick plugged in.

Thanks @rlkoshak, @snoekieboe and @happenpappen

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The Raspberry Pi Foundation has just announced the Pi 3B+.
Compared to Pi 3, it has a 17% faster CPU, GigEth and some PoE powered pins.
Same price. Details here (German only, sorry).

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Is there a good reason to believe that eMMC will suffer less corruption? I wouldn’t think so, as both are basically wrappers and controllers of a piece of flash-memory.

Have you considered whether your corruption issues can be solved by getting a large high quality SD card? High quality needs no explanation, but many people are not aware that more free space on your card gives you better wear leveling, preventing parts of the card to get prematurely worn out by too frequent writes. Also make sure your card has a suitable file system, like ext3 or ext4. File systems like NTFS, FAT, ext2 and some others rewrite data a lot more often than e.g. ext3 and ext4, and will cause your storage to wear more quickly.

I was using a Raspberry pi and I hab the same problem. I switched the SD card for an external HD which helped but the raspi was too slow.
So I got myself a reconditionned thin client from ebay and I am very happy now.
Example:
https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m570.l1313.TR0.TRC0.H0.XHP+thin+client.TRS0&_nkw=HP+thin+client&_sacat=0

I saw the RPi announcement; nice but also disappointing. It delays the possibility of the RPi4 coming out soon.

I just bought one of these. Z83-w Will rip Windows off and put some flavour of Linux on to run OH2. For £80 you can’t argue with it…

No, but to decide in favor of any particular HW is rather a compatibility/support thing.
Any Pi 2 or newer is fast enough to run openHAB well enough, and with millions out there in use, chances to NOT run into HW or OS related issues are higher, and if you still do, there’s much more likely someone out there to be able to help.

Don’t disagree at all. I have many RPi’s running many things - OH2 is one of them. They are brilliant bits of kit.
My thinking behind this is rather the non-SD card approach to it. I’ve had a few failures which just create a headache.

Anyway, I do because I can :wink:
It’s a new toy and, 1 week on, it’s still not used :expressionless:

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Don’t get fooled, eMMC is not substantially better than SD w.r.t. wear-out caused failures. Check this post.

I was actually reading that thread a few days ago and made some of the changes. Thanks :slight_smile:

Not preventing, just delaying. However, enough extra space on a high-quality SD card can extend its life beyond the expected operating life of your system. Thom D. posted a nice spreadsheet one can use to guesstimate how long your SD card should last given measured write rates (see post 63 above).

My biggest issue with SD cards is not that they wear out but that they do so silently. You don’t know there might be a problem until it is too late and things start to become corrupted. And then you have to go back through your backups manually to find which one is not corrupted.

Well, not to be a stickler, but no. Preventing. I said it will prevent premature wear out. :wink: Anyway, I take your point about silent failures on SD cards, but this isn’t unique for SD cards. MMC and other memory cards, as well as USB flash drives, all have this problem. (Maybe some devices with eMMC have built in wear indication in the surrounding hardware – I really don’t know, but I wouldn’t bet on any specific one to have that without checking first.) To avoid silent failures with local storage, you probably need to use a proper hard drive, SSD or mechanical.

As a side note, I guess having a copy of a working, running stable image would be a good idea, combined with a non-local private git repository with all configuration files, where you commit and push every time you do a change. If you need to swap cards, you can just copy the image and git checkout the config.