I experimented a bit with ZHA (native Zigbee integration) but soon realised I needed something better, and Z2M was that something.
It had all been working wonderfully, until I had a problem recently that meant I had to redo the entire Zigbee setup.
I run HAOS on a VM, with the Zigbee radio being passed through from the host. Recently I wanted to play with Thread so I added a radio and passed it through to the VM as well. All was fine, though I wasn't having a lot of time to experiment and the Thread dongle was connected in an awkward position so I decided to yank it out. At this point all hell broke lose. Z2M wouldn't start, throwing cryptic error messages. After a lot of trial and error, I removed both USB passthroughs, rebooted the VM, shut it down again, re-plugged the Zigbee dongle and re-added the passthrough. At this point the hardware side of things was fine but my Zigbee network was gone. To make it worse, a new one couldn't be initialised because it was trying to use the same ID as the previous one. I had to manually change the ID in the config YAML, restart everything, then re-pair all devices.
I really feel like this stuff should be more resilient to failures. Otherwise, it's pretty good!
> At this point the hardware side of things was fine but my Zigbee network was gone.
How come the hardware was ok but the network was gone? Did some Z2M config files go wrong because of two dongles? Did you try to restore VM from snapshots?
Losing the network and having to re-pair everything would be a nightmare for me given the number of Zigbee devices I run (~35) and that some of them are mounted in switch boxes in the walls.
Honestly, I don't think I can answer your question. I didn't change the config but I had to delete and re-pair all devices (or they had been gone from Z2M already at this point, I can't remember - it's mostly an academic distinction though).
It had all been working wonderfully, until I had a problem recently that meant I had to redo the entire Zigbee setup.
I run HAOS on a VM, with the Zigbee radio being passed through from the host. Recently I wanted to play with Thread so I added a radio and passed it through to the VM as well. All was fine, though I wasn't having a lot of time to experiment and the Thread dongle was connected in an awkward position so I decided to yank it out. At this point all hell broke lose. Z2M wouldn't start, throwing cryptic error messages. After a lot of trial and error, I removed both USB passthroughs, rebooted the VM, shut it down again, re-plugged the Zigbee dongle and re-added the passthrough. At this point the hardware side of things was fine but my Zigbee network was gone. To make it worse, a new one couldn't be initialised because it was trying to use the same ID as the previous one. I had to manually change the ID in the config YAML, restart everything, then re-pair all devices.
I really feel like this stuff should be more resilient to failures. Otherwise, it's pretty good!