Windows to Linux (Pi2) migration

[manxam]

My apologies if this has been covered elsewhere but I couldn't find a post matching my query:

I'm currently running HS3 under a Windows Hyper-V VM and would like to migrate to a Raspberry Pi2.

Can anyone describe the steps necessary to convert my existing database (events, devices, etc) to Linux? Can this even be done or would I be starting from scratch?

Besides plugins that may not be supported under Linux, are there any major caveats to running HS3 on a Pi? While I have several servers all running ESXi or Hyper-V and a couple dozen VMs, I'd like to keep 'required infrastructure' items dedicated to their own low power hardware (routers, firewall, automation, vpn, etc).

Thanks in advance for any advice and/or suggestions.

Cheers,
M

EDIT: And it appears I posted in the wrong forum (beta vs regular) but am unable to move or delete. Oh well.

[Pete]

Can anyone describe the steps necessary to convert my existing database (events, devices, etc) to Linux?

When I started with Homeseer 3 I ran it on Wintel and mostly just running one or two plugins or scripts. Concurrently here purchased a Zee and while it was a light version of Homeseer it was preferred.

Over time of a few months switched over to Ubuntu 14.04 64 bit starting from scratch on one box and Zee-2 on the RPi2.

Many times over the last year or so an relating to an upgraded version of HS3 or an HS3 plug-in I would personally just delete the variables / events et al and not do any sort of an import. (note this is what I did based on my stuff here).

You can if you want just import the Homeseer DB's if you want to give it a try. Many folks have already done this. Personally here it has been faster for me to recreate variables, events and data. That is me.

Can this even be done or would I be starting from scratch?

It can be done.

Besides plugins that may not be supported under Linux, are there any major caveats to running HS3 on a Pi?

Yes.

It is still how much you do with Homeseer 3. While Homeseer 3 is considered one application it really is a collection of multiple applications.

Unrelated to Homeseer here have switched my Cumulus weather server from Wintel server to the RPi2 and it appears faster running.

That said the rewrite of the software in general made it faster.

While I have several servers all running ESXi or Hyper-V and a couple dozen VMs, I'd like to keep 'required infrastructure' items dedicated to their own low power hardware (routers, firewall, automation, vpn, etc).

Here its been now a few years that I switched my irrigation software to Linux (with Mono) and connectivity to Homeseer 2 and it has done well on a POE powered Seagate Dockstar with two SSD drives on it. I like that I have a boot and backup SSD on it.

That said I am now at 3 RPi2's and might switch the irrigation (in the rainbird box) over to an RPi2. I can do this a couple of ways today with Homeseer 3; IE: running the irrigation software remotely on the RPi2 with the hardware connections or just running it independently on the RPi2 and have it report status over to the mother ship. Current stock build here now includes a PiFace RTC shim which I like. (only hardware modification to date).

Issue right now with me is that the Dockstar combo with two SSD drives runs fine and I like having two SSD drives. Personally not sure that I want to muck with it as it is working perfectly in its current state.

I am too playing with the new generation of microSD drives but still leary a bit about the RW's taking a toll on the microSD cards. The newer RPi2 / Cumulus MX device backs up to the mothership and writes to a mySQL DB on the mothership today.

I trashed the original Zee SD card within 6 months of pushing it a bit.

The SD card was physically not damaged rather it was the constant RW's that messed it it. I was able to create a new card or fix the old card and just copy over my running Zee Homeseer application directory to get it going again.

The old configured Seagate Dockstar is running only one piece of software today as the new Cumulus MX RPi2. Homeseer 3 is doing more work running multiple plugins, events, scripts and hundreds of variables. Personally if you keep it simple on the RPi2 you will be fine. If you assume that you can do everything that you are doing today on your Homeseer 3 VM be aware you are playing and using a tiny ARM CPU and it will not do what you think it will do with your VM.

BTW the new low powered $100 USD Intel Atom Baytrail running Wintel or Linux runs circles around the RPi2. (note this more my opinion based on my playing). It is more expensive than the $35 RPi2 (note too that the RPi2 is sold a la carte with nothing but a board - add case, power supply, microSD and RTC and you are sitting a bit under $100 with it). Thing is too with said CPU is that I have it only running a 32 bit version of W81 lite and a 64 bit version of Ubuntu 14.04. 64bit is just faster.

The bigger box (main mothership) here running Ubuntu 14.04 64 bit on a low powered Intel iSeries CPU is also running a VM of Windows server which talks to Homeseer in Linux and does well with communications (Homeseer 3 trinkets running in both Wintel and Linux and talking fine to each other).

[manxam]

Thanks for the really detailed reply Pete. Unfortunately this didn't work as I had hoped. The Linux version refuses to load the windows database either manually or using the restore config option. Serialization errors.. I've found several posts about this and HS' response is that it SHOULD work but they've never confirmed that they've actually done it.

I have a 1U rack dedicated to Pi's and so was hoping to use one for HS but not at the time and expense of setting it up from scratch. Oh well...

Thanks,
M

[rmasonjr]

Thanks for the really detailed reply Pete. Unfortunately this didn't work as I had hoped. The Linux version refuses to load the windows database either manually or using the restore config option. Serialization errors.. I've found several posts about this and HS' response is that it SHOULD work but they've never confirmed that they've actually done it.

I have a 1U rack dedicated to Pi's and so was hoping to use one for HS but not at the time and expense of setting it up from scratch. Oh well...

Thanks,
M

I would love to see a pic of your rpi rack. I have 3 just sitting on a 1u tray buy would like to mount them differently.

Sent from my SCH-R970X using Tapatalk

[Pete]

@M

You can load up a Homeseer 3 for windows sql db and compare it to the structure of the sql db for linux and maybe make adjustments to it so it works for you.

I have never tried to do this and have started from scratch on my Homeseer 3 Linux boxes. ( I did initially run HS3 standard / Pro on a Wintel box and did configure a HS3 setup on Windows 7).

You can do just a view window using VNC on multiple monitors of the Wintel box and the RPi box and manually configure each plugin, script and event. It would be time consuming to do.

I do have multiple RPi2's now running. You can today offload the plugins to autonmous RPi2's and just connect them to the mothership (in Linux). I did have issues running the Z-Wave plugin remotely on an RPi talking to Wintel HS3 and vice versa a while ago. I was going to try running the Kinect plugin on the PiPoX7 and have it talk to the Linux mothership. Spud saids it should work. I have not tried here yet.

The Homeseer Zee-2 with RTC clock and GPIO Z-Wave card is destined for the Attic via a POE cable (it will never been seen) and the CumulusMX RPi2 will be velcroed to the back of the Davis Console or in the attic velcroed to a Davis Envoy.

[manxam]

I would love to see a pic of your rpi rack. I have 3 just sitting on a 1u tray buy would like to mount them differently.

Sent from my SCH-R970X using Tapatalk

I'm out of town currently but will take pictures when I return. It's just a generic 1U rack case with smooth bezel holding 6 raspberry Pi's side-by-side bolted to the case using nylon standoffs. Using angled micro usb connectors they JUST fit in a 17" rack chassis (leaves just under 3/4" between each PI). My old Pi B models were all "backfed" via USB ports but I can't seem to make that work with the Pi2 models.

I drilled 6x 7/16" holes in the front for the micro sd cards (if I could drill CLEAN rectangular holes I would have :P )

At the rear of the half-depth chassis I've mounted 1x 8 port switch and 1x powered USB hub. Thankfully both of these operate at 5V so I just used a larger amperage power supply and spliced the power cable into a 'Y'.

At the rear of the chassis I've mounted a keystone jack and a female barrel jack for ethernet and power.

Easy and clean.. I can actually mount a couple more Pi's if I faced the sd card to the sides of the chassis instead of the front but I think 6 is enough for tinkering

I had toyed with adding USB jacks at the rear of the chassis but haven't really needed access to the USB ports on any of the devices yet...

EDIT: My setup is quite similar to THIS without the fans as my case is vented.

[WfromL]

Altough this thread is really old I post anyway.
I had HS3 280 alternatively running on Win 7 and on Linux Mint 17.3 Rosa Cinnamon and indeed the database of Win7 was not transferable to the Linux version.
Yesterday I upgraded to Mint 18 Sarah and lo and behold I can now backup the Win version and restore to Linux version. All my devices and my events are working perfectly.
I guess this is because Mint 18 comes with Mono 4.2

[Pete]

Here I had experimented earlier (a few months back) and it didn't work for me.

That said I did upgrade to the newest Mono on the Pine64 / 2Gb model and HS3 works. The Pine64 / 2Gb runs circles around the Pi 2-3 using Ubuntu 16.04 64 bit.

Personally I would say that HS3 lite and HS3 Standard will be OK on a ARM / new quad core Intel / dual core AMD with 2Gb of RAM NOT pushing it.

HS3 Pro will do better with an Intel/Arm based CPU and more RAM (here using an iSeries / 16Gb of RAM on 64 bit Ubuntu). I can push this one much more than the Zee-2 lite.

All of the HS3 versions are getting fatter and slower (that is my opinion) and doing much more these days.

ICS-pine64:~# mono -V
Mono JIT compiler version 4.2.1 (Debian 4.2.1.102+dfsg2-7ubuntu4)
Copyright (C) 2002-2014 Novell, Inc, Xamarin Inc and Contributors.dub dub dub .mono-project.com
TLS: __thread
SIGSEGV: normal
Notifications: epoll
Architecture: arm64
Disabled: none
Misc: softdebug
LLVM: supported, not enabled.
GC: sgen


I have yet to upgrade the main HS3 Pro / newer Xi3 Xi5A HS3 to Mono 4.X. My last attempts a few months back broke my HS3 Pro running on Linux Ubuntu 14.04.

The Zee-2 HS3 Lite is running on a dual core AMD micro PC / 2Gb RAM and a 32Gb mSATA SSD these days. I prefer the SSD over the micro SD (MMC).

Ubuntu 16.04 64 bit 2Gb RAM and 16Gb MMC

pine64:~# lscpu
Architecture: aarch64
Byte Order: Little Endian
CPU(s): 4
On-line CPU(s) list: 0-3
Thread(s) per core: 1
Core(s) per socket: 1
Socket(s): 4
CPU max MHz: 1344.0000
CPU min MHz: 480.0000

Wheezy 32 bit kernel

ICS-RPi2-Zee:~# lscpu
Architecture: armv7l
Byte Order: Little Endian
CPU(s): 4
On-line CPU(s) list: 0-3
Thread(s) per core: 1
Core(s) per socket: 4
Socket(s): 1
CPU Speed: 900 Mhz - Load Average: 1min 2% 5min 0% 15min 1% - Cores: 4

Xi3 Xi5a - 2Gb and 32 Gb SSD makes it faster - running Zee-2 in Ubuntu 64 bit.

ICS-Xi5:~# lscpu
Architecture: x86_64
CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit
Byte Order: Little Endian
CPU(s): 2
On-line CPU(s) list: 0,1
Thread(s) per core: 1
Core(s) per socket: 2
Socket(s): 1
NUMA node(s): 1
Vendor ID: AuthenticAMD
CPU family: 15
Model: 107
Stepping: 2
CPU MHz: 1000.000
BogoMIPS: 2000.32
Virtualization: AMD-V
L1d cache: 64K
L1i cache: 64K
L2 cache: 512K
NUMA node0 CPU(s): 0,1

Ubuntu 14.04 64 bit, iSeries Intel, 16Gb RAM - HS3 Pro - HSTouch at 16 Windows embedded clients

ics-HS3:~# lscpu
Architecture: x86_64
CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit
Byte Order: Little Endian
CPU(s): 4
On-line CPU(s) list: 0-3
Thread(s) per core: 2
Core(s) per socket: 2
Socket(s): 1
NUMA node(s): 1
Vendor ID: GenuineIntel
CPU family: 6
Model: 60
Stepping: 3
CPU MHz: 3400.398
BogoMIPS: 6783.87
Virtualization: VT-x
L1d cache: 32K
L1i cache: 32K
L2 cache: 256K
L3 cache: 3072K
NUMA node0 CPU(s): 0-3

[WfromL]

I've also been trying out Ubuntu 14/15 with recent mono without success so I was surprised Mint 18 works "out of the box" . To be sure I tried both 64 bit and 32 bit Mint 18, on different Pc's (32 bit on a really old Dell 9300 laptop), both worked perfectly.
Would be nice to hear from HS people what is supposed to work.

[Pete]

Last time I asked Rich he never answered me. The only answers I have seen are from folks like you and I and other forum users (beta testers).

I tested this on a lark with the Pine64 / 2Gb RAM Arm based (almost RPi like) running Ubuntu 16.04...didn't know though that it would work with current version of the Zee-2 HS3 lite...it is not production today though...

Maybe try installing Ubuntu on the RPi2 versus wheezy or ...and see how it works with newest version of Mono.

Unrelated...

For the time bean and because of all of the issues I had I quit beta testing homeseer touch server and clients as every upgrade made it worse such that I downgraded and my 16 clients are stable, not perfect but running every day.

I am today having issues with one desktop and laptop running Ubuntu 16.04 that I didn't have with Ubuntu 14.04/15.04. On the laptop lost my speaker sound even though the headphone sound works....and this all relates to the HD sound chip integration to the HD video ....which really doesn't matter to me as I do not watch movies in surround digital sound on my laptop or my shop desktop.