I have been a bit tardy with managing home automation setup and after getting my hands on the new ElectroLama zigbee gateway I through it was good time to do springAutumn cleaning.

First up was updating Proxmox from 7.4 to 8.x, this went pretty smoothly, but would have gone even better if I had read the instruction manual more carefully. There isn’t actually anything in the release I need but it’s best to keep all these things up to date.

Next were the VM/Container host OSs, I run a mixture of Ubuntu and Alpine in my instances, Ubuntu just took a do-dist-upgrade, and Alpine was iterating¹ through the following steps:

apk update
apk upgrade
vim /etc/apk/repositories # replace all instances of 3.n with 3.n+1

ZZH to ZZHp

Next up was to make sure I was on the most recent Home-Assistant build, I use Home-Assistant core, so my upgrades are via pip (moving off core has been on my todo list for a long time).

Now onto the “fun” stuff, upgrading the stick. Proxmox doesn’t support hotplug for USB devices. So the machine was booted down and the container, and added a line to it’s config to mount the second USB serial device, and rebooted the host².

vim /etc/pve/lxc/100.conf

lxc.mount.entry: /dev/ttyUSB0 dev/ttyUSB0 none bind,optional,create=file
lxc.mount.entry: /dev/ttyUSB1 dev/ttyUSB1 none bind,optional,create=file

With both the old and new Zigbee sticks now visible to the VM it was possible to follow the Migrate Radio workflow from the ZHA setting page. I just accepted the defaults and removed the old stick when it was done with and all devices came up on the stick.

At this point I did a full Proxmox reboot, “just in case” and of course the new zigbee stick came up as a different dev node as it was now the only serial device. I could have done something smart here, but I just re-ran the Migrate radio workflow again to tell ZHA the correct dev node to use.

So… Was it all worth it? Everything is still stable, but I didn’t take any before and after signal statistics but the network is still stable.