I just bought a Vera Lite, because it seemed to be a decent, hardware solution to the issue of having to have a computer on all the time to control some z-wave devices; yes, it’s a computer, but it at least has a lower draw.
Imagine my surprise when I get the device, and it wants me to have an account on externalservers to manage my own network! Not cool. Not cool at all. I am very much not comfortable with allowing information about THE MOST SENSITIVE DEVICES IN MY HOUSE to be on some random company’s servers. I can understand them OFFERING the service for things which most people might not easily be able to set up for themselves (notifications, though I have that easily covered), but it should not be a requirement.
Before jumping through all the hoops to try and return this thing, I thought I’d give it a run through to see if maybe its super awesomeness makes up for any of my initial shock. Getting it associated with a few zwave devices was easy enough, as was turning on and off a smart switch. Just what this thing is trying to do with door sensors, though, is COMPLETELY beyond me. Can I get just a simple “the door is opened” display? Not after mucking around for 20 minutes, apparently. The documentation is, shall we say, not great.
I suppose that if something seems to good to be true, it generally is. I just didn’t think it was that outlandish - the price was reasonable, but not what I would consider “cheap” - and many people actually seem to like this device, so perhaps I’m missing something. I’m trying hard not to be nasty - I really am. But I’m really, really disappointed, because it sounded so good.
By your post there are a few things that a pretty clear…
You did not do much research on the Vera before buying it
You have not used many, if any, home automation apps - either DIY or commercial
There is still hope for you
I’m not going to dive into answering all your questions/issues since searching this forum will answer them several times over. But all I can tell you is (#1 & 2 above) that all of these systems have crap docs, and have a failry large learning curve. The Vera has one of the largest since its UI is sheite. But, once you get the hang of it - and you start to see how great this community is and all the free apps the community provides, you will find that for the $ it is the best (by far) of all the devices/apps. If you want better, you need to spend 3-4x as much $ just to get started.
As for privacy, MCV has no access to your system unless you give it to them. You can run your entire system completely disconnected from the Internet - no issues.
You are not the first to encounter issue starting off and have a look at this thread and the attachments which may assist a little in heading down the path of applying the current MCV logic when utilising scenes.
If you don’t (want to) register an account with micasaverde.com then you can still use your Vera from inside your LAN with no loss of functionality.
If you don’t want remote access to your Vera (or you can roll your own with a VPN server?do NOT just forward port 80 to the Internet) then you can disable the SSH tunnel and stop Vera phoning home. See here: http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php?topic=4782.0
There’s been oodles of talk already about how much trust you put in MCV by registering an account on their servers. Check out the parent forum of the link I gave you. TL;DR is that if you are truly paranoid, put Vera on a subnet and crank up the firewall to prevent it doing anything malicious. (I am that paranoid.)
Thanks for all the responses. One of the things that astounds me is the security nightmare that this device obviously represents. I’ll be digging around more in the unit itself to disable as much as I can, but I really wasn’t expecting things to be this bad in 2013 - someone™ needs to learn some basic security practices.
Yes, there’s no doubt that the solutions out there are lousy - that’s how I wound up here in the first place. I guess I just wasn’t expecting to have to implement basically everything except the z-wave protocol pretty much from scratch, as it appears I have to do.
The device’s security requirements is in line with other home automation devices in its class, full access within local net. These are typically aimed towards folks with some networking & technical knowledge. That being said, I have my vera firewalled off using iptables with linux, so it only allows connections to the
Device from devices inside my network, and only from machines within my network that I specify. Remote access disabled. The weakest link in this setup is my gateway computer.
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