Start Faster - Home Assistant with Podman on a Raspberry Pi using SD Card
A year or two ago, I would have gotten stuck wading into the politics of DBUS - fixed the thing that needed fixing - and moved on (clearing short term memory). Now I can have my helper do that, and still retain nothing in memory. Perhaps I'll have forgotten where I am soon.
Running Home Assistant in a rootless Podman container on a SD Card is a miserable slog when you try to use Bluetooth. --userns=keep-id will require a chown on every file to boot the container - madness on a SD Card (can be upwards of 20 minutes or more on first boot). Failure to do this correctly earns you the error:
DBus authentication error; make sure the DBus socket is available and the user has the correct permissions: authentication failed: REJECTED: ['EXTERNAL']
Rather than code up a side-car, I found yichenshen/dbus-auth-proxy (our patched version: 5L-Labs/dbus-auth-proxy), a small subuid->uid dbus auth proxy someone wrote that can be chained to the standard dbus proxy (which apparently no one wants to touch with a barge pole).
AI has assisted the detailed write-up. Thanks to Shen Yichen for the original code, which I asked my assistant for some bugfixes / made work with quadlets.