Migrate Domoticz to new RasPi
I have been running Domoticz for quite some time now and it has become the central point of our home. We don’t use it just for the lights but also camera’s, temperature, sunscreens, scenes etc. Though the recent version (4.10717) caused an error after updating on my old Pi generation 1 (GLIBC_2.17 missing) so it was time to migrate my installation to a new Pi (generation 3).
Normally an Domoticz upgrade is done in a few minutes though after I started it last week, the dashboard stayed down. When I logged into the Pi using SSH and started the Domoticz manual, the following error appeared;
pi@domoticz ~/domoticz $ ./domoticz ./domoticz: /lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libudev.so.1: no version information available ./domoticz: /lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.17' not found
So time for an Hardware upgrade!
Step 1; Save everything from the old Pi
Luckily I used the auto-backup feature to create a daily backup from the database. This means that Domoticz saves its database inside domoticz/backups Even though I was unable to boot domoticz, I could still reach it using SSH. I copied the whole /home/pi/domoticz folder to my desktop using WinSCP. You will have to check if you have sufficient rights to copy the complete content as some of the sub-folders where restricted. You can easily work around this by making the pi user owner of all the files and folders by running the following command
pi@domoticz:~ $ sudo chown -R ^C domoticz/* pi@domoticz:~ $
Step 2; Create a new Pi installation

I had an Pi generation 3 laying around and decided to use that one for my new Domoticz installation. The first step was to create a clean and up-to-date installation. I grabbed the latest version of Raspbian Stretch Lite (the choice of OS from Domoticz itself) and placed the image on a Class 10 Micro SD card using Rufus.
After the SD Card was done, I tested it in the new Pi and it worked just fine. By default, the SSH server is disabled and I love to copy/paste commands using Putty from my own Desktop. So the first thing is to enable the SSH service and change the default password.
- The default username (pi) and password (raspberry) can be changed with the passwd command.
- Enter the “raspi-configuration” tool by executing the following command;
sudo raspi-config
- Select “Interfacing Options” (fifth in the menu)
- Navigate to and select SSH
- Choose Yes
- Select Ok
- Choose Finish
Now we can SSH into the system using our favorite SSH client (putty in my case). I reran the raspi-config command to change the following in order to prepare for Domoticz; Hostname, Timezone and Expand the root file system (hidden under advanced option). After a reboot I updated everything with the following commands;
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade sudo rpi-update sudo reboot
That’s it for the setup! Now we just need to install Domoticz on our new Pi and we can move on to the next step. There is a super easy way of installing with the following command;
curl -L https://install.domoticz.com | bash
I leave everything default except for the port (8080) which I change to 80.
Step 3; Migration
Now that we have a working Pi with a default Domoticz installation, I had to restore my settings and (history) data. I renamed the new installation folder and used WinSCP again to copy my backup “domoticz” folder to my new Pi. Below the steps for the rename thereafter I copied the data to the same location.
pi@domoticz:~ $ sudo service domoticz stop pi@domoticz:~ $ mv domoticz domoticz_fresh
After the copy I tried to start it though discovered that the domoticz file was not executable though a quick
pi@domoticz:~ $ sudo chmod +x domoticz

fixed that issue I thought I was done at this point though after I started, nothing happened. I stopped the service and started it on the command line to check what was going on. I noticed that my OpenZWave Driver failed to load (see output below) I use a GPIO ZWave board from Zwave.me and I did not remembering getting a driver disk or anything 🙂
pi@domoticz:~/domoticz $ sudo ./domoticz 2019-05-14 17:23:29.963 Status: Domoticz V4.10717 (c)2012-2019 GizMoCuz 2019-05-14 17:23:29.963 Status: Build Hash: b38b49e5, Date: 2019-05-09 13:04:08 2019-05-14 17:23:29.964 Status: Startup Path: /home/pi/domoticz/ 2019-05-14 17:23:29.993 Sunrise: 05:42:00 SunSet: 21:25:00 2019-05-14 17:23:29.993 Day length: 15:43:00 Sun at south: 13:34:00 2019-05-14 17:23:29.993 Civil twilight start: 04:59:00 Civil twilight end: 22:08:00 2019-05-14 17:23:29.993 Nautical twilight start: 03:60:00 Nautical twilight end: 23:08:00 2019-05-14 17:23:29.994 Status: PluginSystem: Failed dynamic library load, 2019-05-14 17:23:30.004 Active notification Subsystems: (0/13) 2019-05-14 17:23:30.005 Status: WebServer(HTTP) started on address: :: with port 8080 2019-05-14 17:23:30.010 Status: WebServer(SSL) started on address: :: with port 443 2019-05-14 17:23:30.013 Status: Camera: settings (re)loaded 2019-05-14 17:23:30.061 Starting shared server on: :::6144 2019-05-14 17:23:30.062 Status: TCPServer: shared server started… 2019-05-14 17:23:30.062 Status: RxQueue: queue worker started… 2019-05-14 17:23:32.063 Status: Hardware Monitor: Started 2019-05-14 17:23:32.077 Status: P1 Smart Meter: Using serial port: /dev/ttyUSB0 2019-05-14 17:23:32.078 Error: P1 Smart Meter: Error opening serial port! 2019-05-14 17:23:32.079 Status: Nest: Worker started… 2019-05-14 17:23:32.080 Status: EventSystem: reset all events… 2019-05-14 17:23:32.082 Status: EventSystem: reset all device statuses… 2019-05-14 17:23:32.142 Status: EventSystem: Started 2019-05-14 17:23:32.142 Status: EventSystem: Queue thread started… 2019-05-14 17:23:32.580 Status: OpenZWave: using config in: /home/pi/domoticz/Config/ 2019-05-14 17:23:32.584 Always, OpenZwave Version 1.4.3335 Starting Up 2019-05-14 17:23:32.585 Status: OpenZWave: Starting… 2019-05-14 17:23:32.585 Status: OpenZWave: Version: 1.4-3335-g74e05982-dirty 2019-05-14 17:23:32.587 Error: OpenZWave: Driver Failed!!
I search the web for just the driver though there was not a lot of information out there in regards to the GPIO version of my ZWave controller. Thus at the end I installed the zwave.me software;
pi@domoticz:~/domoticz $ wget -q -O - razberry.z-wave.me/install | sudo bash
After the installation that took about 2 minutes, I disabled the (web)service from zwave.me and did a reboot.
pi@domoticz:~/domoticz $ sudo update-rc.d z-way-server remove
pi@domoticz:~/domoticz $ sudo reboot
After the reboot domoticz ran just fine with all my historical data, settings, scenes etc. I did disabled the “Check for Updates (Not working on windows systems)” feature as I want to avoid this in the future (and my kids press on everything…)
Life saver! Got this error after migrating Domoticz (and the Z-Wave hardware) to a new Pi. Driver failed… This fixed it (although I’m really annoyed that I don’t understand what EXACTLY it fixed).
Thanks!
yw Joris! Probably the same problem as me, the driver needs to be on the new Pi and is not part of the /domoticz folders.
Super! This is my new how-to for migration; 6 miles shorter than all the existing ones that involve re-partitioning etc.etc.
Thanks so much!!