I have my Vera 3 bridged to a Vera 2, so I can control a USB device (x10 cm11a) physically plugged into the Vera 2.
I wrongly assumed this process would ‘bridge’ the z-wave network too, and make the Vera 3 primary, and the Vera 2 secondary. The problem is I can’t assign the Vera 2 as the secondary by ‘controller shift’, unless I copy the z-wave network to it first.
When I do that, because it’s bridged too, every device shows up twice on my Vera 3. Is there a way around this? Can I turn off bridging and add the USB to my setup if it’s not plugged into the primary controller?
As you say, the bridging of Veras does not do anything at the Z-Wave network level, and they remain separate. What you CAN do is bridge both ways: Vera 2 to Vera 3; Vera3 to Vera2. This will give a (single) copy of all devices on both machines, and you should be able to control any device from either Vera.
I have all my significant plugins in the ‘master’ Vera - this includes dataMine (so it has access to all devices) and similarly ones which have nothing to do with Z-Wave (eg. Netatmo, Denon, …). In fact, this master machine has NO Z-Wave devices directly attached at all.
I do have a few, but important, plugins on the two other machines: Log Viewer, VSwitch, VContainer, and such like. My remote control App (HomeWave) accesses the master only (but, again, sees all the devices)
This seems to me to be the best way to do things with bridged machines.
Anyone tried to install vera alerts on multiple vera’s? Any issues?..
I had some issues , and couldn’t use the same android “code” to send the message to.
I am having trouble bridging 2 vera 3 controllers and need some help. Soemwhere I thought I saw a post that bridging could not be done when vera is set in wireless client mode. So I hooked both vera units up via copper but when I go to add device / upnp / scan / next, I am not seeing the other vera unit. I see one of my managed switches to add, but no other vera. Any advise?
I must admit that the first time I did this, I had to call on MCV support, and they didn’t tell me what they did to make it work. However, I believe that you do need “Auto detect devices on my home network” ticked on the network setup page.
I do have the auto detect checked in setup, and I have followed all of the instructions to the letter. I was on the phone with support yesterday for well over an hour and he could not seem to help me and advised I open a trouble ticked, which I did. I have taken both of my Vera 3 units, plugged them in side by side in the same switch, unchecked the scan for Upnp, then rebooted, and then rechecked the scan for Upnp and waited half an hour, and on one unit I get my managed Cisco switch to show up, which is the switch it is plugged into, and on the other Vera 3 I get the same switch and my lap top showing up, but no Veras.
You know how a lot of plug and play devices will show up themselves on a scan, like your own computer, but you don’t even see itself.
Akbooer, I wish I could get the same guy you got from support, I really don’t care how they get it to work, just make it work. I even went as far as trying to add my own device in apps and give it a device type of urn:schemas-micasaverde-com:device:HomeAutomationGateway:1 and file type of vera.xml, plugging in the IP address and Mac address of the other unit, again no joy.
I did a real simple test, took both units and a lap top and pluged them into a basic dlink router, just one of those little cheap ones I had lying around. Didn’t even hook it to the internet. Booted everything up and still no joy. But here is the strange thing now, even though I unchecked discover upnp, saved, rebooted, then checked it again to do a new scan, the old switch, which I am no longer connected to was still showing, but only the Cisco switch and not the Veras. So I am not even sure it is doing a scan anymore, and it certainly is not clearing out anything it had previously scaned.
I am almost afraid they are going to tell me that they need to be set back to factory defualts and try again. I would hate to have to set my entire system back up again.
After capjay’s post, that got me thinking… Problem is now solved. Just to save some time, here is the responce I sent back to tech support about this issue. hopefully anyone else trying to bridge units and runs into this same problem now can solve the problem.
Here is my responce sent to support:
I believe I have solved the problem. After reading several white pages on plug and play device discovery, I found some interesting information from Cisco. Many of the Cisco switches, and I imagine other managed level 2 ? 3 switches, does not easily pass discovery of Upnp devices. This may also be the case with some of the cheaper router/switches, since a cheap Dlink router/switch did not work for me either. The Cisco white paper does not go into very clear detail as to why some Upnp devices can not be discovered. And apparently to add another Vera 3 device can only be done by discovery. (You should consider developing a manual way to add another Mios Vera 3)
Solution: Since I am a software developer and IT manager by profession, I have a lot of equipment at my disposal for testing. I took an old Linksys SRW208MP switch ( just a simple 8 port PoE switch) and made a small network with a lap top, the two Vera 3 devices attached. Then did another scan for Upnp devices and after about 2 minutes, both of the Vera 3s showed up. Then I went thru the add procedure and all of the devices from the one Vera showed up on the other.
I then disconnected this make shift network and plugged everything back in to my main network and everything works. The two Vera?s are able to talk to each other thru the Cisco switch, the problem was simply the discovery. Apparently once the secondary Vera is added as a device to the primary Vera, communications between the two is not a problem.
You may want to consider updating your FAQ to include this discovery communications problem on some switches. If you would like any further detail, I would be happy to write a white paper on this issue.
You can mark this ticket as solved if you would like and no further troubleshooting is required. If you ever do address the issue of adding another Vera for bridging manually, I would like to be advised.
@rjstuart - Your issue sounds like it is due to multicast filtering by your router or switch, blocking the multicast UDP UPnP traffic.
Multicast filtering is not a Vera issue. MCV cannot change the UPnP specification, nor can they force networking equipment vendors to use a particular implementation. It would be more helpful to tell us what routers or switches you used that exhibited the problem and how you had the Veras located on the network, e.i. different subnets, firewalls in between them…
As I stated in my previous post, I discovered it is at the network level, that Upnp discovery was blocked by certain switches. By network topography is that there is a single vlan, with all devices set to a single class c subnet. There are three different level 2, managed switches I tried, a Cisco SF 300 24-P, a Linksys SRW224G4P, and a Dlink DGS-1210-28P. I had Upnp discovery problems with all three. It is only when I tried a Linksys SWR208MP unmanaged switch that I got discovery to work. There are some sub switches in my system, but both of the Vera?s are attached to the primary switch in the system which is one of the three I mentioned above. Once the two Vera?s were able to discover each other, there was no problems adding as a bridge device, and once added, I could return back to my normal setup.
So you are correct that these switches are blocking Upnp traffic. I post this so that anyone else that might be using some higher level switches and runs into this problem will have a work around and perhaps figure some switch settings that may allow for that Upnp traffic to not get blocked.
Just a minor correction, for the clarity of others. These managed switches are blocking multicast traffic, that UPnP uses for discovery. They aren’t blocking UPnP specifically. Most non-discovery UPnP traffic is unicast UDP and will work fine through those switches, as you described.
For the Cisco 300 Series you can configure Forward All Multicast. This makes it treat multicast packets as if they were broadcast packets.
For the Linksys SRW224G4P I believe that you must enable IGMP v2 snooping AND enable the IGMP Querier. This is done on the Multicast tab. Check the manual as I am not really familiar with this switch.
I suspect the D-Link DGS-1210-28P has something similar, but I’ve never dealt with that model or any of that brand’s managed switches.
Just a minor correction, for the clarity of others. These managed switches are blocking multicast traffic, that UPnP uses for discovery. They aren’t blocking UPnP specifically. Most non-discovery UPnP traffic is unicast UDP and will work fine through those switches, as you described.
For the Cisco 300 Series you can configure Forward All Multicast. This makes it treat multicast packets as if they were broadcast packets.
For the Linksys SRW224G4P I believe that you must enable IGMP v2 snooping AND enable the IGMP Querier. This is done on the Multicast tab. Check the manual as I am not really familiar with this switch.
I suspect the D-Link DGS-1210-28P has something similar, but I’ve never dealt with that model or any of that brand’s managed switches.[/quote]
Thanks for the info. I haven’t had the time to play with the switches but I will work on this next week and see if I can get discovery to pass thru these switches and report back. But it seems that once the Vera 3 units got discovered, they are maintained in the units so I am not quite sure how to clear out this memory in the Vera to try and run another scan. I might get another Vera 3, primarily as a backup unit, and then play with it on my network and see if I can get it discovered changing parameters in the switches.
But if anyone knows how to clear out this previously scanned info from the Vera, please let me know. And I have already tried unchecking the upnp scan, save, wait, then re-check the scan and save. But all the previous devices are still there.
Yea I figured it would be. I can access the Vera using WinSCP and snooped around a bit in it’s memory, but sould not find where those scanned devices reside as a list. I am assuming that they are stored as some sort of variable or list, and unless they are stored in binary, I just can’t seem to find them. Maybe if someone with a better understanding to the memory storage of the V3 can chime in, I would appreciate it. I figured it would not be in the /mios directory since that looks like it is read only and I snooped all thru the /usr and /tmp directory with no luck.
I believe they’re stored as regular devices in the user_data structure. You can access this (read only) via a Luup HTTP request, see:
[url=http://wiki.micasaverde.com/index.php/Luup_Requests#user_data]http://wiki.micasaverde.com/index.php/Luup_Requests#user_data[/url]
Alternatively, if they HAVE appeared as devices in your system, then you should be able to delete them with another HTTP request, as described here:
[url=http://wiki.micasaverde.com/index.php/Luup_Requests#device]http://wiki.micasaverde.com/index.php/Luup_Requests#device[/url]