This is a quick documentation on how I've setup akri in my kubernetes cluster to make my Conbee II stick available to zigbee2mqtt as a remote device. This allows zigbee2mqtt to run on any node in the cluster. The advantage to using Akri over node-feature-detection and node affinity rules to run zigbee2mqtt on a given node is that when a device is unplugged Akri will automatically remove the pod. So I can move the stick from one node to another and less than a minute later the stick is ready to be used again.
Eventually Kubernetes plans to add requiredDuringSchedulingRequiredDuringExecution affinity rules which in theory could
give us a similar effect where zigbee2mqtt could connect directly to the device rather than connecting remotely, but we could
simply move the stick and the zigbee2mqtt pod would follow it.
With this configuration, you should have a kind: Service that gets added which will have an endpoint going to the broker pod
running ser2net on port 2000. Akri sets the Service name to <Configuration.metadata.name>-svc. So lets say our
Configuration is named conbee-ii in the host-system namespace in zigbee2mqtt and the standard kubernetes service domain
confiugration, you would configure zigbee2mqtt to use tcp://conbee-ii-svc.host-system.svc.cluster.local:2000.
Note: This should also work with other sticks. For example, my Aeotec Gen 5 stick would get matched with udev this rule:
ATTRS{bDeviceClass}=="02", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0658", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0200", SUBSYSTEM=="tty"
However, at the moment, I haven't swapped it over yet. I'm testing the waters with my zigbee stuff as zigbee just has my lights and sensors. My door locks are on z-wave and I want to make sure that stays stable.
Your HelmRelease for akri may or may not need the patches I have applied. The reason I have applied the patches is that Akri relies on crictl and by default it is looking on the host system for it. In my case I'm running talos, where access to the OS is via a CLI + API. It prevents shell access so it's a little difficult to get something installed on the host. But in reality it doesn't NEED to be on the host, so I've patched it to just download crictl to an emptydir volume shared in the pod. I suppose I could have alternatively still mounted a host path and download it there and include the script to check if its already present.
The Configuration CRD is what will actually tell Akri to match a specific device and create a broker pod, which I've defined
for now as just an alpine image that runs a shell script that installs and starts ser2net. I didn't see any recently updated images
that run ser2net, so I just did this for now. Perhaps I should create a ser2net docker image that can be updated automatically with
renovate ✨.
It's also worth noting that currently there appears to be a bug in at least the deconz driver for zigbee2mqtt where if the service ip changes or in otherways times out, the driver blows up before it tries to re-connect. Specifically this block of code needs to be updated to handle both this.serialPort and this.socketPort because it throws a Cannot read property 'isOpen' of undefined error when performing this.serialPort.isOpen. This an issue that went stale around this. I've opened a PR to fix this here.
👍🏻 awesome! Glad this could be helpful. Thanks for sharing for ArgoCD too!