Home Assistant OS in Linux container (Incus/LXD) on RPI5 with reverse proxy (Nginx) in separate container

Goal

I wanted to have Home Assistant OS running, but didn’t want to dedicate a full Raspberry Pi for this. So I searched whether is was possible to have HA running in a Virtual Machine on my main Raspberry PI.

Used sources

https://discussion.scottibyte.com/t/home-assistant-os-in-incus-101/648

Environment

• Raspberry PI 5 with 4 GB RAM
• Running Arch Linux
• incus (linux container installed) with 4 containers running amongst them a Nginx reverse proxy

  Working machanism

  In order to run a Virtual Machine, an emulator (qemu) and Virtualizing extensions (KVM aka libvirt) are required.

Used sources

• https://forum.openwrt.org/t/wireguard-server-on-openwrt-router-behind-isp-router-firewall-config/189027/20
• https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/services/vpn/wireguard/basics
• https://www.makeuseof.com/how-to-set-up-wireguard-windows/
• My own experience to get this working :)

Used sources

• Installing containers for reverse proxy and webserver
  • https://www.linode.com/docs/guides/beginners-guide-to-lxd-reverse-proxy/
• Installing Letsencrypt certificates
  • https://certbot.eff.org/instructions?ws=nginx&os=ubuntufocal

Introduction

In this post I describe my experience with installing LXD/Incus containers on Arch Linux.

Although Arch linux is not (yet) officially released for the new Raspberry Pi 5B, I wanted to get it working (because I am a little bit addicted to arch linux). I found an good site that describes how to do this, so all credits go to this site.

I had developed several Zephyr programs. I like Zephyr very much, see also my other blogposts about Zephyr, but Zephyr and the Nordic SDK are still in development. This means things are changed, and when you do not regulary build you programs using the latest versions, you don’t know whether you programs still work.

Synchting () is a great open source syncing program, that can be used inside your own LAN, without data ever leaving your LAN. I use it to sync data between different laptops en my Android Phone (it is not supported on IOS, due to high CPU usage).

In this blog I explain how you can install and configure openVPN on your Openwrt router.

This posts summarises how you can run the hello world sample on the Nordic Thingy91. I had to do some special things because I do not have a programmer. So I had to program the hello word sample via MCUboot.

Machine learning is very interesting and also can have several applications on embedded devices.

This posts shows how the sensors on the Arduino nano 33 BLE sense can be used in Zephyr.

I use Renode to simulate an Arduino nano 33 BLE. In this way I am able to test applications without using real hardware, without flashing the program and without the need for hardware debuggers. I am able to run Zephyr programs, and debug these with GDB. This accelarates software development considerably.

I was looking for an RTOS to program my Arduino nano 33 BLE. First I used Arduino/mbed, but later I came across Zephyr. Whereas mbed is only supported for ARM architectures, Zephyr also supports other architectures like ESP32/Tensilica. This enables reuse of your programs on different architectures.

With Yocto you can create your own embedded linux distribution. So you can decide what will be incorporated in the linux image and what not. You can customise your linux image and optimise it for the embedded system you are using.

I am using Windows laptop with Office365 and recently switched from an Android phone to Apple IOS. After this change to IOS the question popped up how to handle my contacts. Should I put everything in iCloud and install the Outlook iCloud plugin, or not?

I always kept my work hour registration (how much time for what project) in my Android app (My work clock). After switching to IOS I have looked for a comparable app, but could not find a right one. So I installed the open source Kima hour registration on my Raspberry Pi3 running arch linux.

In this post I describe several (Arch) linux tips, I used myself on my raspberry PI running Arch linux. Maybe they are also helpful for you.

Install adblock

You have to install adblock itself and a luci-helper to be able to configure adblock via the GUI:

opkg update
opkg install adblock
opkg install luci-app-adblock

Regular expressions are very handy to search for certain strings. Note that there are different versions of grep.

I was running Domoticz on my Raspberry PI (RPI), but because I also did some development work on the RPI, sometimes the RPI crashed. And my Domoticz should always be running, because all my home automation runs on it.