Please help - Recover 7 months of work

TrueNAS General
1

Hi all, I’m looking for some help trying to recover my Home Assistant OS that I had running on a Fangtooth VM.

Here’s the background: I recently transplanted my TrueNAS server to a new MB and chassis to prepare for some upgrades. After sorting out a few issues, I got everything working.

I shut down the server today to make some small cabling upgrades, and when I booted everything back up, I realized my Home Assistant instance was no longer working. The VM would start, the HA container would boot and get to the HA CLI, but I couldn’t access the web page. When I looked at the CLI, I noticed it seemed to be referencing the old network adapter ID, so I started trying to troubleshoot the issue.

One of the things I did was to create a new virtual machine to try and access the zvol my HA instance was saved on. I remembered that after the transplant, I encountered a situation where I couldn’t update the parent interface on VLAN - I had to delete the interface and create an entirely new one. I thought something similar might be going on here, that despite updating the NIC on the VM, something about the VM itself was still referencing that old adapter ID. In the process of switching back and forth between the old VM and new VM to see if I could get it to work, I started the old VM while the new one was still running. I tried to stop everything, but the damage was done - now the TrueNAS VM will start, but the HA container won’t. I’m now in “Rescue Mode” on Home Assistant and I have no idea where to go next.

Can anyone please offer any assistance here? I’ll be on HA’s forums asking if there’s some way I can export a backup from this Rescue Mode, but does anyone have any advice on how I can repair this zvol following this mistake? Of course, I apparently forgot to set up snapshots for this volume (though I did others, ugh) and my last external backup was about 6 months ago.

2

I have zero experience with HA. But I have some questions:

  1. What is the point of an HA container if you are running a VM for it?
  2. Did I correctly understand that you were using the same zvol for the 2 VMs simultaneously?
3
  1. Right, so I installed Home Assistant OS onto a Zvol, and a TrueNAS VM runs that Zvol. When I say “container,” I’m just referring to what Home Assistant says is failing when it attempts to start up.
  2. Yes, correct, I didn’t mean to have 2 VMs access the same Zvol simultaneously, but that’s what happened, and after that happened, the HAOS no longer starts up.
4

Gotcha.

AFAIK, having 2 VMs accessing the same block storage is a very bad idea… to the point that being able to do this seems like a truenas(?) bug to me.

Imo, you should snapshot your zvol now before doing anything else (just in case). Then you should back up your HA config from any of the two VMs. Quick googling brought me this guide; I don’t know whether it’s good or not. And try to restore it on a fresh new VM with a new zvol and a fresh HA installation.

Anyway, I do believe HA forums would be more useful in this situation.