Continued from Best hardware platform - #151 by guru_florida
Have at it.
In my opinion, anything like this would belong in openHABian or even better a new project. And adding this feature to openHABian means that openHABian needs to become much more ambitious and end up creating an appliance (a la DD-WRT, pfSense, openMediaVault, openELEC, etc) where EVERYTHING can be done through a web-based or at least graphical UI.
- openHABian would have to become some sort of web server instead of shell scripts
- it would need to create UI widgets or pages or plugins in order to support the configuration and maintenance of not just OH but also all the external stuff that OH interacts with like Mosquitto, InfluxDB, etc.
- because of all of this extra work, it would need to be quite a bit more limited in options available to install and configure until you get enough developers to contribute to the project. I see this being almost as big of an effort as OH itself.
- What format does the back take? I really like the XML format backups of pfSense takes, but holy cow what a lot of work. I’m pretty sure they use base-64 blobs for stuff like rrd4j though so it would be theoretically possible to do something similar for OH.
Note, I’m talking about openHABian. I don’t think this is something that belongs in openHAB proper. Also note that the backup and all the rest will be features of an entire turn key software appliance. The problem is MUCH bigger than just backup. And given how it is nearly a throwaway of openHABian and starting over it probably should be its own separate new project.
It would be awesome to achieve. But would I rather people spend their time on building something like this right now over spending efforts on things like new bindings, improvements to the capabilities and usability of the existing UIs, etc? Probably not. Though this is an opensource project. If you and a group of fellow devs have a strong desire to start work on something that would be great too.
There is plenty of precedent for this sort of approach. But this would necessarily be a compliment to openHAB itself, not really part of openHAB.
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Well, ok. Sighing for a number of reasons but not because I understood you want me to do it (got that).
Sighing because I thought I had expressed and still feel that there’s absolutely no need for such a thing.
Sighing as well because Amanda does the job. It’s way more comprehensive than what you proposed (if I understood that one correctly).
And we need such a comprehensive solution and unlike the impression propagated, it IS easy to setup (now that it comes packaged with openHABian. Before that - well that’s a completely different story).
As of your proposal, I don’t see any benefit in monitoring the event bus, and there’s nothing wrong with backing up all relevant config in one go just as the openhab-cli backup script and/or Amanda do. No need to slice/dissect installed modules or config parts (which would be a tough task, btw. But it’s rather because I don’t see any benefit from that).
Since you’re capable of and willing to contribute there’s certainly areas for you to jump in that OH would benefit from a lot more.
I’ll give Amanda a try. I got into dev mode for my pool integration and I’ll be creating a binding for nodejs-poolController project.
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Thanks Rich, I get the separation of OpenHAB vs OpenHabian now. I’m only a week in, so just dawning on me. I agree 100% too; it’s like what a Linux distro gives to users versus Vanilla Linux. Thanks for the feedback.
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