Full disclosure: I just–and I mean just–got my head wrapped around docker and containers due to installing Proxmox on my server. Right now, my Proxmox server runs a LXC container for docker, and in docker I run Handbrake and MakeMKV images that run the GUIs in a browser or run with command line. They connect to each other through mounting the LXC’s /home/user into both., then added a connection to the remote shares on my other server so I can send them to my media server. Yes, I did have to map all the mountings out first before I started but hey, that’s how I learn.

Long way of saying: I am just now able to start understanding how Home Assistant works–someone said Home Assistant OS was basically really a hypervisor overseeing a lot of containers and now that I use Proxmox, that really helped–but I’m still really unfamiliar with the details.

I installed the full Home Assistant on a dedicated Pi4, so it’s the only thing it does. Until yesterday, the only part I actually interacted with was the data portion, which is where all my files are, where I configure my GUI and script, store addons, etc. The container for this portion runs on Alpine Linux; I can and have and do install/update/change/build packages I need or like to use. in there It’s ephemeral; anything I do outside the data directory (it holds /config, /addons, etc) gets wiped clean on update, so I reinstall them whenever HA does an update .

When I run my data collection scripts on my Home Assistant SBC, they take their information from the container aka Alpine Linux., including saying my OS was Alpine. All of this worked correctly up until–according to the directory dates, December 10th at 2:40 AM when the /sys/firmware was last updated and everything in it vanished, breaking the symlink to /proc/device-tree/model. This also updated the container OS to Alpine 3.19.0. Data collection runs hourly; one of my Pis ssh’s into each computer to run four data collection scripts and updates a browser page I run off apache, so I can check current presence and network status and also check the OS/hardware/running services of all my computers from the browser (the services script doesn’t work on Alpine yet; different structure). I didn’t notice until recently because work got super busy, so I only verified availability and network status regularly.

These are the packages I install or switch to an updated/different version the Alpine container to help with this or just have fun: -figlet (it’s just cute ASCII art for an ssh banner), -iproute2 (network info, when updated has option to store network info in a variable as a json),

• iw (wireless adapter info),
• jq (reads and processes json files),
• procps-ng (updated uptime package for more options),
• sed (updated can do more than the installed one),
• util-linux (for column command in bash),
• wireless-tools (iwconfig, more wireless data if iw doesn’t have it) (Note: I think tr may also be updated by one of these.)

These are the ones I use for data collection that are already installed:

• lscpu (“Model name” “Vendor ID” “Architecture” “CPU(s)” “CPU min MHz” “CPU max MHz”)
• uname (kernel)

These are the files I access for data collection:

• /proc/device-tree/model (Computer model)
• /proc/meminfo (RAM)
• /proc/uptime (Uptime)
• /etc/os-release (Current OS data)
• /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp (CPU temperature for all my SBCs except BeagleBone Black)

Until this month, all of those files were accessible both before I do the package updates and after. The only one affected was maybe /proc/uptime by the uptime update to get more options. Again: I’ve been running these scripts or versions of them for well over a year and I test individually on each SBC before adding them to my data collection scripts to run remotely; all of these worked on every computer, including whatever SBC was running Home Assistant. (Odroid N2+ until it died a few months ago) And all of them work right now–except /proc/device-tree/model on my Home Assistant SBC. The only way I can get model info is to add an extra ssh to Home Assistant itself as root and grab the data off that file (and while I"m there, get the OS data for Home Assistant instead of Alpine), save it to my shell script directory in my data container, and have the my script process that file for my data after it gets the rest from the container.

That’s why I’m weirded out; this is one of the things that is the same on every single Linux OS I’ve used and on Alpine, so why on earth would this one thing change?

This could conceivably be an Alpine issue; I downloaded Alpine 3.19.0 to run in Proxmox when I get a chance, and I kind of hope that it’s a deliberate change in Alpine, because otherwise, I can’t imagine why on earth the HA team would alter Alpine to break that symlink. Or they could be templating Alpine for the container each time and this time it accidentally broke. The entire thing is just so weird. Or maybe–though not likely–a bug in Alpine 3.19.0, but I doubt it; I can’t possibly be the first to notice, it was released at least three weeks ago and I googled a lot.

I’m honestly not sure it affects anything at all, but it bothers me so here we are. Though granted, it did make me finally get off my ass and figure out how to login as root into HA as well as do a badly needed refactor of my main data collection script (the one that does the ssh’ing) as well as clean and refactor my computer information scripts, so maybe it was destiny.