Nearing the end of my string with Vera

Community Playground General Discussions
#1

I’m reaching the end of my string with Vera and I wonder if its time to search for a new HA platform. I’ve reached the point where I cannot count on Vera to be working continuously.

About once a week now I wake up in the morning to find my ZWave Vera “hung up.” This morning I found the last SysLog entry at 06:54, only the POWER LED ON, Vera responding to the PING and SSH access shows “LuaUPnP” WAS NOT RUNNING and of course no ZWave activity was present.

I thought about buying a automatic power switch (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EZWD146/ref=ox_sc_sfl_title_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A1MAXJIALWUXGM) to power cycle a “hung up” Vera but it uses PING to determine if the device is running and my Vera seems to always respond to the PING even if its isn’t doing anything useful :slight_smile:

This same set of circumstances happens about once a week now and seemingly always in the early morning hours. [The Nightly Heal is disabled (“Use Vera Routing” UNCHECKED) at the suggestion of Tech Support for the past month so it isn’t that. The Heal was disabled as this “hang up” was occurring every other day while it was enabled and this seemed to have reduced the frequency at least.]

It has been suggested by Tech Support that UI7 fixes a number of RESTART problems, reducing the cause of some of them but I’m willing to bet not the results of such a “hang up.” I’d go to UI7 but there still seems to be reports of an ongoing Plug In problem with several of the ones I depend on, particularly PLEG. I have an ongoing ticket with Tech support for over two months on this problem and thus far there is no resolution – I suspect they have given up on my problem :slight_smile:

When it is working properly I periodically monitor LuaUPnP via SSH and I find the its Memory Usage is always between 85-95% and CPU Usage varies widely from 5-10% jumping up to 90+% about once a minute. I suspect this jump is PLEG processing schedules or some such but I have no hard evidence of this.

The baffling thing is how LuaUPnP can be sitting at 90+% memory usage and I still have over 40MB of available main memory on the machine — the machine is not starved for memory but the design of LuaUPnP forces it to live in some defined memory space and not grow to use what is physically available. As we all know by now, every time LuaUPnP grows above 100% it sets the stage for an eventual unplanned restart.

As a former designer/programmer (20+ years on big iron) seems like a poor basic deign to say the least. I can see the logic of constraining the program to a fixed space in a general purpose computing system so as not to interfere with the accounting system, etc., but this is a dedicated function system … about the only thing it can interfere with is itself, and it seems to do that on a regular basis :slight_smile:

Anyway, climbing down from the soapbox I think it may be time to look at another solution. I’ll hang in there to UI7 but if it continues then Homeseer maybe?

#2

I won’t repeat my past rants, but as a technology professional with 30+ years of experience, it’s obvious the shortcomings of how MCV implements their product. For example the latest firmware change once again changed many things, breaking the layout of several plugins. Did MCV warn anyone? No.

There are other alternatives out there, none of them perfect, but the point is that there are alternatives. You just need to set your price point that you are willing to spend. Once I can get past the more important priorities in my life, I’ll revisit my HA system with a critical eye and enough time to explore other products. Till then, I’m in constant research mode watching the market for new products and improvements in existing products.

#3

Sorry to hear this. Mine seems to run really well, and I have quite a few plugins, but do very little in terms of plug or complicated scripts. Seems like that’s where a lot of issues come from (no disrespect for Plug… awesome work).

I’m constantly on the lookout as well, more to hedge my bets if my system does become unstable, but everything I read seems to be similar in other forums. As for Homeseer, have you read this post?

http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php/topic,31095.0.html

#4

[quote=“tomgru, post:3, topic:186388”]Sorry to hear this. Mine seems to run really well, and I have quite a few plugins, but do very little in terms of plug or complicated scripts. Seems like that’s where a lot of issues come from (no disrespect for Plug… awesome work).

I’m constantly on the lookout as well, more to hedge my bets if my system does become unstable, but everything I read seems to be similar in other forums. As for Homeseer, have you read this post?

http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php/topic,31095.0.html[/quote]

I just picked a name out of the air, I haven’t done any serious looking yet :slight_smile: I used Homeseer back in the dark ages of X-10 … it was just OK but my environment was pretty basic, turn a few lights on at XPM, off at YPM, etc :slight_smile:

I like Vera a lot, but probably mostly for the rich user-supported tools than anything else :slight_smile:

#5

I am busy porting my plugins to Raspberry Pi / BeagleBone Black, developing a Luup emulation environment I am calling “OpenLuup” which, in the end, will allow plugins to run on those platforms with absolutely no changes to code.

It’s currently working for a couple of my own plugins, and my next task is to try it out with HomeWave. If I can get such remote apps to believe the Rpi / BBB is a Vera then almost everything I need is already available. It’s not a very complete emulation, but it’s good enough to make things work. One thing I don’t plan to port is the ZWave interface itself, for which Vera actually does a good job. Same concept as OpenHAB, really.

It’s great to work on a stable platform with 500 Mb of memory and 1 GHz clock speed. CIFS comes ready installed so NAS storage is already there. I don’t plan to abandon Vera, I’m just seeking a better development environment and cross-platform plugins.

#6

I am with you @clippermiami. This weekend I am going to do a factory reset of my Vera3 UI5, and manually rebuild of all my devices, plug-ins, and PLEG logic. If that doesn’t resolve my restart issues, then I really only have a few things left to try before having a really good reason to move on… I essentially have nearly everything I want built and working in Vera - now it just needs to run stable, and that isn’t happening…

#7

+1.

My VeraLite UI5 is okay, and way more stable than UI7 ever was, but the weird and unexpected behavior once in a while just ruins it when you spend so much time, effort, and money putting together the system, and you get a half baked command and control unit.

I have high hopes for the smartthings hub v2, but the more I research, the less sure I am that it will be stable any time soon, or when it will ever launch.
I think I may be headed in the http://www.indigodomo.com/ direction since I use a MacMini as a home server already.

#8

I am busy porting my plugins to Raspberry Pi / BeagleBone Black, developing a Luup emulation environment I am calling “OpenLuup” which, in the end, will allow plugins to run on those platforms with absolutely no changes to code.

It’s currently working for a couple of my own plugins, and my next task is to try it out with HomeWave. If I can get such remote apps to believe the Rpi / BBB is a Vera then almost everything I need is already available. It’s not a very complete emulation, but it’s good enough to make things work. One thing I don’t plan to port is the ZWave interface itself, for which Vera actually does a good job. Same concept as OpenHAB, really.

It’s great to work on a stable platform with 500 Mb of memory and 1 GHz clock speed. CIFS comes ready installed so NAS storage is already there. I don’t plan to abandon Vera, I’m just seeking a better development environment and cross-platform plugins.[/quote]

Hi akbooer,

I like very much your idea . Nice work !!

donato

#9

I haven’t updated to the latest UI7, but I am running a recent (perhaps the previous) UI7. It has been very stable for me, once configured.

I agree though, if their goal is to be the consumer plug-and-play HA solution, they have to fundamentally change the way they do things.

#10

I won’t rehash the several posts where I specifically outline Veras issues and why they will never be any more than they are today… And were two years ago.

I’m going to be looking at Fibaro as they are supposed to be releasing a major update soon. I saw the system at CES and it looked like it had tons of potential and already far ahead of Vera in most ways.

More importantly the Fibaro team seems to understand what to do, and what is needed in this space. Vera is fundamentally broken and I see no signs of that changing.