I left behind on this team a thread of leaving Open Hab and it received some really great feedback which is great as this community is one that is very open and positive. I’m still running both OpenHab and Home Assistant next to each other then I updated again and then noted that I could not longer run front tail. So went back into Openhabian config and installed it again. Now found I’m locked out sudo, and in a few days ago after last update Node Red needed an update to work and loved openhab but updates not working and then asking me to spend so many hours working out what went wrong. hmmm.
Now also please understand I’m not throwing shade on OpenHab as it works really well and probably better for those coming into the environment as it has great support and and amazaing community of people who can help (some shade here I don’t post on HomeAssistant as the forum is not polite).
There is also a huge learning curve with Home Assistant which is why I still have the two running together, but now after the update to Open Habian which has locked me out of sudo the writing is on the wall.
End with a very polite thank you to all the wonder and creative people of Open Hab, you are amazing and it has been wonderful to work and contribute to this project. Who knows V4 I might come back.
Being locked out of sudo is not something that openHABian would normally do. Whether or not you stick with OH, it would be incredibly helpful we we could understand what you were doing prior to this happening so, if it’s something we have control over, it can be prevented from happening in the future.
Nothing like this has ever been reported before so . Typically one gets locked out of sudo under three circumstances:
they wanted to manually change permissions allowed, edited the sudoers file not using visudo and introduced a syntax error resulting in an invalid file
the machine crashed or otherwise ran into trouble while writing to the sudoers file resulting in an invalid file
making a change to the file that removes sodo permissions from the login user
openHABian wouldn’t do 1 or 3 so did 2 happen? Or did you inadvertently do 1 or 3 yourself (in which case it can hardly be blamed on openHABian, but it would be helpful to know what you did as there may be ways to prevent it in the future (e.g. adding a menu option to openhabian-config)).
Hi Rich.
Thanks for the super fast feedback. I and will report this directly to the git repository for the Openhabian team as it was totally unexpected. I ran the whole process via logging in normally as the openhabian user and then ran openhabian config and requested a reinstall of fronttail after that I was unable to access sudo.
Nothing went wrong other than node red stopped working but a power reset fixed that as could not access sudo shutown. Reset has my system working but again now sudo. Owner of sudo is now the tailuser.
Upgrade was within the the 3.0 releases. I noticed that my web call to the tail url did not work so I thought go back into open-habien and reinstall, then found I was lock out of sudo. did nothing different from update, restart, restart and clear cach and restart again.
And thanks also Rich you have been a great inspiration on home automation and have deep respect for all the work you have done with examples to follow.
I also run both systems. Mainly because there are some components home assistant has that OH doesn’t and I am not a good enough programmer to convert HA to OH integrations instead I just pass them to OH. I much prefer OH for rules and item configurations. HA makes the simplest of tasks super clunky. I have to agree with you also that HA forums are not very noob friendly and the documentation makes you even more confused than they are helpful lol. I honestly think the reason HA is beating OH in respect to user base is because 1. it is all YouTubers talk about (such as Linus Tech Tips) and they just have more presence. 2. Once they got the users it was easier to keep them.
There is nothing about that process that would have done anything to break sudo. I actually just did a scan of the code that runs when you install Frontail and the sudors file isn’t ever touched.
I suspect you might be facing some other weird and unrelated to openHAB or openHABian problem, Has this RPi recently lost power and/or is the SD card kind of old? This speaks to a file system corruption or a failing SD card. If this is the case, there’s nothing that openHAB nor openHABian (nor Home Assistant for that matter) could have done to prevent it. openHABian does have the zram config built in to limit the number of writes to the SD card to keep it from wearing out too fast, but once the card is worn out, there’s nothing it can do. The same goes for power failures.
There is no such user. There is a frontail user. But there is nothing that the installation and configuration of Frontail does that could change the ownership of the sudors file.
I’m afraid there is nothing that openHABian can do to fix this nor anything it could have done to prevent it because it didn’t do this in the first place. There is something else very seriously wrong with your SD card or file system and no matter what you do, you should consider replacing it because I suspect the loss of sudo is the least of the problems you’ll be seeing coming down the line.
I’m sorry the thing that thing that is pushing you away from openHAB is almost certainly not something that has anything to do with openHAB or openHABian itself.
If you are having problems running home automation program A on linux and your issues are related to the host OS rather than the application or its environment, you are highly likely to face issues with program B when run on the same OS.
When the proverbial fecal matter hits the air distribution mechanism, it’s very helpful to know something about the host OS and be able to fix it.
Fixing getting locked out of being able to sudo is much quicker than replicating an entire home automation setup on a new platform.
Are you running this on a Rpi? Unplug the SD card, plug it into another linux machine and fix the permissions. Takes a few minutes at most.
Are you running it in a VM or a physical x86 machine? Boot it from systemrescuecd (or similar), mount the disk and fix the permissions.
I’m not trying to talk you out moving to HA - but if you want the best return on your time investment, stay.
. Typically one gets locked out of sudo under three circumstances: