Anybody running openHAB on a FreeBSD or FreeNAS platform?

Plugins & Plugin Development openHAB MiOS Binding
#1

Is anybody running OpenHab on a FreeBSD or FreeNAS platform? If so, any issues? I have enough HP left on my FreeBSD N40L NAS for it. But I really don’t want to have to convert that one to eg Linux as ZFS seems to run best on the BSD platform.

I am hedging my bets and making sure I have a backup solution for my HA.

#2

@BOFH,
For general questions on openHAB, you’ll want to post to the openHAB forum as there are a lot more users, with a wider variety of deployments/experiences.

You’ll also find a starter-list of platforms in their Hardware FAQ:
Hardware FAQ · openhab/openhab1-addons Wiki · GitHub

It’s not the most complete list, but it’s a good start.

Generally speaking, the platform will need Java (1.7 or above) available for the Platform, as well as enough Memory (512M starter, more preferred) to run the system in a reasonable manner.

#3

@BOFH - yes it can be done and is pretty stable. Search on the Google Groups forum for FreeNAS and you’ll likely find a bunch of posts (mostly from me) when I got mine up and running. The hardest part for me was the learning curve of FreeBSD as I wasn’t as familiar with it. Run Java 7, not 8 or 6. And there should be a thread you will find about startup scripts to set it to run as a service. A kind soul on the forum shared his script and it worked perfectly.

I no longer run FreeNAS as I’ve switched to XPEnology (basically open source synology) and can’t help as much anymore. There is support thought, and the mios binding works great too.

#4

@Guessed/shmixx: Thanks for the update. Memory is not really an issue as that N40L has 8GB (Needed for ZFS) and an AMD 1.5GHz AMD Turion II. Time to check out the OpenHab forums and see what they say. I’ve used FreeBSD since version 1.x so I am very familiar with it. Leaving the learning curve to be OpenHab. I searched google for Openhab and FreeBSD and found nothing. Guess I should have used FreeNAS instead. (Which basically is a stripped down version of FreeBSD targeted at NAS functionality)

#5

@BOFH - target the search from the Google Groups forum as @guessed indicated. General googling won’t bear as much fruit. You should find some hits from the Groups site if you use FreeBSD on the forum. FreeNAS should get you almost as many hits. I think I tried to include both as much as possible to ensure people understood.

#6

First encounter with Google+ communities and I am totally lost as to how to navigate that. Not really wanting to get a Google+ account so the oompaloompa’s at Google can track me all over. A quick search of that community (without logging in) for FreeBSD and FreeNAS brought up 0 results so not very promising there. Guess I am too old a fart to deal with all this modern stuff. 8)

#7

It’s actually not in the Google+ pages. I’m not sure how people navigate that one either. It’s in the Google Groups section for openhab that @guessed linked above.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/openhab

Copy and pasted here for you. Once you hit that page, there will be a search bar right at the top of the page you can use. It is very much like a regular forum, just no individual boards to sift through. Just a laundry list of topics you can dive into and join a conversation. I don’t recall if you need to login if you only want to browse the content, I don’t believe you do. To reply you need a Google account.

#8

hitting head I copied guessed’s link but it seems my smartphone browser had an issue with it and pushed me to a different page. Which was the one I could not navigate. I tried it on Firefox on my laptop and now I am getting where I need to be. Thanks again.
Looks like I can read and search fine but yeah, to post you need a Google+ (not just a Google) account.

Time to build a lil jail on my NAS box and start playing with OpenHAB.

#9

Ahh gotcha. Ya that could do it. LoL. The mobile pages are hard to navigate I can agree there. One other benefit you get using FreeNAS - ZFS snapshots. They’re your friend and easy to take of the jail before install, and/or at milestones of functional progress! That way you can easily start fresh or pick up where you left off with a known good config.

#10

Yup. That is why I run that N40L with a full FreeBSD setup with ZFS. Worst case I can use it as a failover for my other N40L FreeBSD box that handles my servers/gateway/firewall duties so I don’t lose my internet connection.

Thanks again for the pointers.