With great power comes great responsibility. Or something like that. I’ve been shifting services between nodes to try optimizing a bit. I’ve shared my current build above!
There’s a few big changes, mostly related to shifting VPN and my Home Assistant installs over to my secondary node. I’ve also added an MQTT server in an LXC, along with adopting Frigate, also running in an LXC with Docker sitting on top.
Migrating Virtual Machines and Containers
Shifting the VPN LXC and the Home Assistant VM were fairly trivial, I just performed a back up of them via the Proxmox GUI, then used SCP to move those files over:
scp -pr /var/lib/vz/dump/* username@ipaddress:/var/lib/vz/dump
After completing the SCP process, I just restored the backup from the Proxmox GUI, confirmed the restore was working okay, and deleted the backups, old LXCs, and old VMs.
For HomeAssistant, I ended up shutting the VM down and removing the Zigbee dongle that was passed through prior to backing up. Once it was restored on the secondary node it was as simple as plugging the dongle in and passing it through to the restored VM.
Frigate, MQTT, and beyond
Along with the move of services from the primary node over to the secondary, I also finally added a local NVR - Frigate. Along with Frigate I needed MQTT, which was a pretty simple install and setup process so I won’t bother covering it.
For Frigate, I’ve added a 2TB TeamGroup NVME SSD for footage and (finally) a Google Coral USB tensor processing unit for faster local object detection. I’m patching in 2 WyzeCam v3s, along with my Reolink doorbell. For Wyze, I’m leveraging Docker Wyze Bridge in Home Assistant currently, however I’ll be moving over to Wz Mini Hacks directly on the cameras which should allow full offline control.
On the software configuration side, this is running out of Docker Compose on top of an LXC with both the Coral TPU and a folder on the NVME drive mapped to it. I’m setup with Go2RTC grabbing all the feeds in Frigate and then re-streaming on localhost to reduce connections to the cameras. Other than figuring out the specifics on motion mapping, zones, and a missed line on my Go2RTC settings that prevented me from getting a feed while outside the network, it’s been smooth sailing. All notifications are setup through Home Assistant and have been working reasonably.
I will say the local object detection and faster notifications has been great compared to what Wyze was feeding me on the app. I haven’t been using a lot of storage space with this either - My retention settings are pretty restrictive currently, so I’m likely to extend the numbers a bit now that it’s been in place for a few weeks. I’ll probably cover my config in a bit more detail once I’ve moved the Wyze cams over to local, but for now suffice it to say I’m happy, but still tweaking.
Dev?
After moving all of my important infrastructure services from the primary to secondary node, I’m left with a whole lot of available memory and a fair bit of processing power. I don’t have any current plans for DEV, but I’ve been throwing around ideas like:
Ansible for Infrastructure as Code
Application Evaluation
Windows home lab
I’m not sure when exactly I’ll get started on this stuff, but I’ve got about 28GB of RAM sitting free, so there’ll be a lot of room! Stay tuned!