[quote=“tomtcom, post:60, topic:199140”]I believe it is caused by having upnp enabled which is needed for network discovery.[quote=“jeubanks”]Does anyone have any idea why Vera is probing my network? It looks like it’s from the stupid camera app but I’m not sure. Hundreds of these in my LuaUPnP.log and for multiple IP addresses. Looks like it’s doing a probe of my subnet looking for a connection.
Kinda fun when upnp is not enabled then??? I’ve been watching my logs a lot over the last several days doing other dev work and I’ve seen a lot of those messages. Some I would say could be uPnP related, but most of them look like they are the Camera app probing to find cameras.
According to that post, Vera’s app which hasn’t been updated in a long time or their VistaCam firmware for that matter, could think it’s lost connection causing this. I do recall these and I think I’ve seen them in my logs recently too.
Do you implicitly specify the MAC address for the camera? I have had to do this a number of times otherwise I got connection errors in the UI. Since I doubt you are seeing any errors in the UI, that may not help any.
Normally we would try to remove the app and see if the logs persist but that Apexis app or the other camera app will reinstall itself anyways. I never found much resolutions to most of Vera’s logging anyhow and gave up unless a UI problem was reporting an error.
According to that post, Vera’s app which hasn’t been updated in a long time or their VistaCam firmware for that matter, could think it’s lost connection causing this. I do recall these and I think I’ve seen them in my logs recently too.
Do you implicitly specify the MAC address for the camera? I have had to do this a number of times otherwise I got connection errors in the UI. Since I doubt you are seeing any errors in the UI, that may not help any.
Normally we would try to remove the app and see if the logs persist but that Apexis app or the other camera app will reinstall itself anyways. I never found much resolutions to most of Vera’s logging anyhow and gave up unless a UI problem was reporting an error.[/quote]
I have no cameras in Vera. This Vera Plus is a clean factory reset with only a couple of devices in it for some testing I’m doing.
This is pretty nasty… Likely some left over code for a plugin which somehow got integrated in the firmware. Only if we could find where it is a get rid of it.
As an update, I now got 60hrs with the vera blocked from the internet without a luup reload. As I am travelling, I got some zwave devices reporting missing though and won?t get to it until I get back. I suspect I can wake them up or reboot them to see if it is a device issue but these are devices which have never failed before. It will be interesting when I get back.
According to that post, Vera’s app which hasn’t been updated in a long time or their VistaCam firmware for that matter, could think it’s lost connection causing this. I do recall these and I think I’ve seen them in my logs recently too.
Do you implicitly specify the MAC address for the camera? I have had to do this a number of times otherwise I got connection errors in the UI. Since I doubt you are seeing any errors in the UI, that may not help any.
Normally we would try to remove the app and see if the logs persist but that Apexis app or the other camera app will reinstall itself anyways. I never found much resolutions to most of Vera’s logging anyhow and gave up unless a UI problem was reporting an error.[/quote]
I have no cameras in Vera. This Vera Plus is a clean factory reset with only a couple of devices in it for some testing I’m doing.[/quote]
Now that I think about it, you have verified the camera app isn’t installed? For all reports I have seen this is baked into the firmware and downloads automatically. This is part of their method to ensure a camera added has the software it needs. In UI6 it wasn’t there there I remember and I think you had to download it.
Others have complained that it gets redownloaded as soon as you uninstall it.
If it’s not there, I’m sorry, don’t mean to go on a wild goose chase.
Probably referring to the sercomm camera plugin which is inexplicably force loaded in the last 3 firmwares. It initially could be removed but would come right back due to a plugin sync function I found in the logs and now can?t be removed at all in the last release in spite I of all the requests on this forum to get rid of it. Pretty exhasperating to me…
I am now getting close to 100h without a luup reload while being completely offline and I still have the same 4 devices which are not detected for the past 3 days. I might be getting somewhere. My hubitat is on the same network and I discovered is very easy to configure, at least for all the power switches.
I also discovered that the latest firmware removed the armed disarmed switch for the sirens and defaulted my sirens to disarmed which I think disables them… another undocumented change.
Removing more and more content from the vera. I am continuing to find new elementary issues with data corruption this morning with the vera going into infinite loop of vera reloads until I did a factory reset and recovered from backup without any apparent error in the logs. I have practically given up on vera now. My architecture is continuously changing and going away from vera dependance:
Homekit bridge and Xandem now connected to openLuup instead of the vera. Number of scenes down from over ~120 to 34. Devices down from ~280 to 200.
Next: moving Homewave and HABridge away from the Vera
I have moved quite a bit to HomeAssistant and allowed it to take over some things I was trying to do with the Vera. I noticed that stability returned after removing the ping sensor, ecobee, and multiswitch plugins. I’m not suggesting that either of these may have been causing my issues. They all seemed to be well executed plugins. I also had some outside python scripts accessing the Vera data through http that might have been loading it up and causing issues. Either way, at this time it’s basically radios and it’s solid. Still have PLEG doing some things. It’s a must on this box…
Yup. With little to no plugins Vera runs well as a radio box. I get the feeling the Mios system and Vera were not intended for what they are marketing and instead are meant as control boxes for other systems to interface with. Makes since with their extensive Interface API for other systems to hook into with. That’s about the only thing well documented about Vera.
I have been going back and forth for some time thinking I could keep the vera as my radio bridge and control everything else through openLuup and Home assistant. Every time I got to some level of hope that it will stabilize, the vera eventually craps out one way or another: Either luup engine, zwave network management, worse yet data corruption.
Eliminating plugins does help but I am now looking for an alternative radio with an API. Another Home assistant instance on a raspberry pi was an option but I am now also considering Zway… Homeseer I think is too spendy for what I want to do with it.
[quote=“rafale77, post:72, topic:199140”]I have been going back and forth for some time thinking I could keep the vera as my radio bridge and control everything else through openLuup and Home assistant. Every time I got to some level of hope that it will stabilize, the vera eventually craps out one way or another. Either luup engine, zwave network management, worse yet data corruption.
Eliminating plugins does help but I am now looking for an alternative radio with an API. Another Home assistant instance on a raspberry pi was an option but I am now also considering Zway… Homeseer I think is too spendy for what I want to do with it.[/quote]
Yeah after a certain point of number of devices the Vera stability still tanks. It’s odd as some people can have hundreds of devices in their system and have absolutely zero problems. (so claimed). Then others have only a dozen or more and they have a nightmare experience.
I didn’t look into Zway too much. Keep us posted if you go that route.
Rafael77, I have a ZWay module. I got away from it due to lack of support. I didn’t want to have to spend a weekend programming simple things that weren’t available or customizing modules every other day. Now, if HomeAssistant supports it, that’s a different story. The software that came with it at the time left a lot to be desired…
Yeah I hear you but the idea for me is to just use it as a device bridge and then use a plugin into openLuup.
I came home tonight to find out after a few tests that my vera did a luup reload which killed its lua socket module again… which means that any luup calls calling for any http communication fails with no error. The rest of lua codes still work. Luup reload and reboot don’t do anything. I have to reopen my firewall and do a luup reload to make it work again. What a disaster this vera is! I still have no idea what caused the reload as I was far away and absolutely no event occured, I already don’t have any plugins and then I get this random death of the lua socket which can’t be reloaded without an access to some server.
Edit: I might have accidentally discovered something: I am using a pihole as a DNS server and have been setting my vera with a DHCP reserved IP. As a result the vera had partial access to the internet through the DNS server although all of its direct attempts to the vera servers were blocked by the firewall. I have now set it up with a static IP but this time using a DNS on the internet it cannot access since it is blocked by my firewall. The result is that the UI no longer shows that internet access is “ok”. I assume that this changes some behaviors within the OS and that it will no longer try to reach anything on the internet which I hope will stop some of the erratic behavior it’s been displaying.
Ohh well I just have to move the rest of my scenes out of the vera…
In the long run, I can see Vera no longer being part of my setup. I went over a week and then got a luup restart for no reason I can see. I have one device that sometimes loses sync between the Vera and Home Assistant. Working on that. The little Raspberry Pi computers are the shit…
One cool thing about Home Assistant and the rPI’s is that the pi is cheap so you can buy more and offload things and use stream to keep the home assistant instances in sync through MQTT.
HomeSeer has this built in using remote plugins. You can run the plugins on a remote system, even a Pi and connect to the Master HS server
I have now moved all the code I had which made use of the lua socket out of the vera as I found out the problem repeated again after a few hours: Found out the vera had done a spontaneous full reboot and upon recovery, disabled the lua socket. It means that I have no scene which communicates with the outside world. The vera only responds to API requests/polls.
What I am finding strange is that any type of reboot will not recover the vera which means that the blockage must be written somewhere that is not in the user_json.lua and persists after a full reboot and is a state that is likely purposely written in the code following some failed server connection attempt in spite of the vera knowing it has no internet connection. Why would you do this MCV developers?
As a reminder, if I give internet access to the vera and run a luup reload, I will recover all functionalities. I can then block the vera again and reboot at will without losing these functionalities until a spontaneous and unwanted luup reload or full vera reboot which I now believe is caused by the vera attempting to call home in an attempt to download files and sync apps I never installed and did not need to begin with. Again why would you allow such nasty behavior MCV?
I have now migrated all possible logic to openLuup. Only remaining scenes are turn on and off scenes for lights triggered by scene controllers.
In the process of deleting scenes from the vera I noticed that intermittently the lua socket comes back to life as I have a notification set in my startup lua to notify me of luup reloads. The startup lua however seem to trigger with quite a bit of delay as if the vera was trying to reach the internet for some time and then load the startup lua and scnes only after that internet check times out. This could also explain why it sometimes won?t load at all if the whole process takes too long.
I have done everything I can to make the vera work. In this condition, it just did another spontaneous reload. It already has near nothing in it besides the zwave and zigbee devices…
I’m about to move some logic to openluup as well.
In my quest to have a stable system, I managed to get incredible stability by not reloading neither rebooting anything.
I managed to get 5 days with no luup reloads.
I found that by not executing tasks from 2 to 4 am I got a very stable system.
That’s probably because Vera is underpowered and incredibly not well engineered - albeit mono tasking.
I’m an engineer myself and I can see the smell of bad architecture…
