I notice the app allows manual connection to Vera. How is this accomplished. I thought you couldn’t manually set an IP address on the Vera.
Although the using the mios.com service to automatically handle the connection is preferred, you may use manual IP addresses if you wish.
To do this you will most likely want to configure your vera to use a hard coded IP address instead of DHCP (which may result in the vera’s IP address changing). This is done in the advanced network settings through the Vera web user interface.
In automator.app if you wish to connect using an ip address (or domain name) you create a manual connection. Doing so will prompt you for the connection details for the primary and secondary address. Think of this as a failover mechanism – if the primary does not connect it will attempt to connect to the secondary, then alternate between the two until a connection is established. You might use this if you have different IP addresses/domain names when inside your wifi network versus externally, say through 3g. Defining the secondary address is optional.
Automator.app uses the data request port 3480, so if you are using a manual connection to connect outside your network you will need to forward this port to your vera.
This is really good information. I was able to setup for manual connection, which is awesome because connecting thru mios.com was becoming very flaky recently. I don’t think many know about this capability as the iVera app doesn’t seem to support this feature.
A word of warning for folks considering Port Forwarding to Vera from their Internet connection… whilst convenient, folks can use this to completely bypass your Firewall and do ANYTHING on the Network that Vera lives on.
ie. Full, and Open, access to your home network, unless you’ve segmented it into VLAN’s (which is unlikely)
Obviously, this is nothing to do with the Automator app, it’s more of a “if you port-forward to Vera” issue as has been discussed a few times before.
I must agree that using direct port mapping is not a secure or ideal solution for over the internet connection to Vera. I strongly encourage using the forward servers (mios.com) to handle this. That said, I understand that many have had connection issues through this of late (although I have not personally had any issues). There are some users who prefer the direct mechanism as they are not comfortable with using the mios.com service.
Personally we have a VPN available as a backup means to connect directly to our units when mios.com service is not available. The setup of a VPN may be beyond the reach of most users though.
For those are are using port forwarding there are advantages and disadvantages to using a primary and secondary addresses to handle inside and outside connections. Since using that mechanism will always result in Automator.app attempting to establish a connection using the primary first, and the nature of a network timeout if it is unavailable for a long time, it may take some time before the secondary (which may be the currently correct path) to be attempted.
To get around this some users define two manual connections, one using the internal/local address and one using the external address. The benefit of this approach is both systems are attempted simultaneously, most likely resulting in finding a connection quicker. There is very little overhead in terms when the app attempts to connect to both manual definitions at the same time.