It’s known that Firefox running XP SP2/3 tends to crash at file download quiet often.
On FW upgrade after image is downloaded user is presented with an option to save a backup. If Firefox crashed on that (and it happened every single time I tried to save backup), unit becomes totally inoperable - data can’t be loaded, DB corrupted messages, no telnet, resque links don’t work - until it’s power cycled. Then Vera wakes up like nothing happens.
The problem here is not that it’s not terribly user friendly, but rather that strange feeling that I just bricked $300 device. Non-techie user won’t necessarily run to try to power cycle it right away, so panic is imminent, and this is sure way to get bad reviews and feedbacks.
Been a while since I have been on the board, but I have been catching up on your posts.
What exactly is working properly with VERA? Seems like the more changes get made, the worse the system operates. Just fired mine up again to see if any of the issues I had been having were fixed by now, upgraded the firmware, tried to edit a scene, and no joy. Tried to delete scene, no joy. Oh well, off it goes again for another month or so. I have high hopes that someday I will actually be able to use VERA for something other than a paperweight.
Well, I’ve been through many development cycles, for small and large projects, and this one looks pretty normal. Doesn’t go especially easy I admit, but it will eventually stabilize. They always become stable unless stopped in the middle. So you could go meditate for some time. Helps to keep the right attitude.
Per Chimpware’s post here: http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php?topic=269.0, I made a guarantee that if he contacts our tech support and let’s us see the logs to see what’s going, and the problem isn’t fixed within 1 week, we’ll give him his money back and let him keep Vera. We’ve got the final release done, with the new videos, and it’s ready to go. But we can’t reproduce the problem, so we can’t fix it unless someone let’s us see the logs.
Regarding Firefox crashing on the download, I think this is fixed in the new firmware we have now ready to release (just doing the final test suite now). I think it was caused by having ‘verbose logging on’, which fills up the ram drive very fast, and with a big download happening at the same, also to the ram drive, the log rotation might not be fast enough to clear space before it fills up and runs out of memory. In the new firmware, verbose logging automatically shuts itself after 12 hours without an explicit override, and before a new download, we purge all the logs to make more room.
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