ra2 findvera down

Community Playground General Discussions
1

i’m just creating a new topic, there’s a long thread on this in the hi-jacked DNS topic below. i’m creating this as a new topic in the hopes that someone from vera will notice that RA2 has been down since friday evening.

for UI3 users like me, RA2 is the default, which means that square remote, and presumably the new vera branded iphone app i’m beta testing haven’t worked all weekend.

as i stated in the other thread, i love your product, and i want to see you guys succeed, but it’s pretty janky when your user community has to inform you that your server crashed. to me it means that your hosting it in your brother in laws basement, and you don’t really know what you’re doing, because there are a bunch of free, open-source tools that provide basic monitoring and alerting capability. not to mention, if you were actually paying for a real hosting provider, they would manage all of that for you.

so please- if you’re designing a finder service into your product as a core feature, at least make sure you can keep it running at standard SLA levels or something approaching reasonable for early adopters. i don’t mind a couple of hours downtime, but it’s been close to three days, which is ludicrous.

if you need any advice, feel free to PM me, but i’m assuming at this point that this is just laziness and neglect to read your message boards over the weekend.

once again, for the record, i love your product, but pull your s@#t together or outages like this will cause your less technical users to return units in frustration, or crush what limited support resources you have.

and one more bit of advice- if anyone from vera replies to this, please just 'fess up and keep the discussion open and honest in the spirit of the community…what i mean is, if the server is in your brother in laws basement or where-ever, and someone kicked the cord and unplugged it, and your lead software developer was in mexico drinking all weekend and his phone didn’t get reception, that’s all fine to admit, and puts a more human face on the whole thing, and endears the community to you even more.

take for example, how the square-remote guys admitted that their last update broke their product on friday. they pretty much just came right out and admitted that they screwed up and apologized.

2

Just for new users coming along, I believe the ra1 vs. ra2 is not a UI2 vs. UI3 thing. It is based on the serial number of your Vera.

3

Very well put, theevaluator, when you are trying out new stuff you need to understand where you stand.

Full disclosure allows us to not knock ourselves over issues that we think maybe self-inflicted.

I’ve spent the weekend trying to figure out what I had done to break this and I would like for someone at MCV to say sorry…that’s all…then we can work together to make this better…

The SQ guys are not only open they are sincere and I hope that they don’t lose their enthusiasm!!!

4

thanks mike-

my unit is 3 days old from smarthome via amazon, although it did have an older firmware release on it. the borked square remote update forced me to move to UI3, but i never noticed if i was always using RA2 or not.

i see you’re a senior member of the community, but you don’t take any material issue with the main thrust of my post- which is-

for the love of god, someone please a key component of your product hasn’t been working since friday, and-
get your crap together, fix it, admit your mistake, and don’t let it happen again.

it’s a great product, but to ever break out of the early adopter arena- they’ve got to do better…already you can see people are finding it on amazon, who probably aren’t geeky enough, and are getting frustrated with documentation and a lack of support resources.

5

I’ll have to chime in and say ra1 / ra2 don’t seem to be tied to UI2/UI3. I have 2 veras (newer ones)… The first I ran on UI3 for awhile and downgraded to UI2. It always was on ra2. The second vera is the newer one as well, I downgraded that to UI2 immediately (before registering with findvera) and that box is also on ra2.

6

I totally agree that MCV should have monitoring in place for there services and should have been alerted to the fact that ra2 was done within a few seconds of the problem occurring. Ideally, this monitoring would also update a end-user visible status web page with some sort of automated message and that MCV would update that automated message once the issue was diagnosed and an ETA for resolution was determined.

7

18:15 Eastern Time… I tried and got into RA2.

8

Vera may actually be the answer to knowing when Findvera is down!

We each need to create a scene, that triggers our motion detectors, to turn on the lights, then captures a picture from our net cameras, that show us as all waiting patiently in our living rooms for FindVera to come back online, then emails or texts it automatically to a MCV contact.

All we need is a number. 8)

9

Hi all,

We are sorry for the outage that occurred yesterday. We fix it the moment our sysadmins were notified. We are doing our best to keep things under control and to fix whatever goes wrong and I hope that all of you knows that.

We take full responsibility for any issue occurred on our end and we will always fix them!

Thanks!

10

[quote=“mcvovidiu, post:9, topic:165859”]Hi all,

We are sorry for the outage that occurred yesterday. We fix it the moment our sysadmins were notified. We are doing our best to keep things under control and to fix whatever goes wrong and I hope that all of you knows that.

We take full responsibility for any issue occurred on our end and we will always fix them!

Thanks![/quote]

thank you for your reply, but let’s be clear. the outage occurred from 6pm friday evening PST, and lasted the entire weekend.

11

Yesterday? Hmm, not my fault, I didn’t do it, not my job, . . . .

12

I will continue to request that MCV immediately post a system status to the “General Announcements” board when this happens. It would save a lot of vain troubleshooting as we all try to figure out what has gone wrong with our systems.

And it would project an impression of professionalism to the MCV user base that couldn’t hurt.

13

I was wondering?

If Vera can send me a message when it loses link with my Vera Box, why can’t it also send a message when it is down?

14

This outage came close to being the final straw for me. I’m a programmer by trade and was expecting a certain degree of tinkering to get Vera up and running. However, the firmware it shipped with didn’t work, the upgrade installed a flash-based system that doesn’t work properly in Chrome, the documentation seems to be a choice between that aimed at completely non-technical users and expert LUA programmers, and then my confusion was compounded by this outage and not being able to get a response about it from the ticket I opened. My general impression so far is that the platform is potentially very capable and does amazing things when it works, but that it’s not yet stable. Some sort of indication from the Vera unit that it can’t connect with the remote server would be very useful.

15

I think we are out again…ra2 is giving a mysql error, maybe it is backing up…10:00 pm Sunday night.

16

ra2 working okay for me just after 10… no problems here…