I have a Vera 2 4000+ miles from my main home, which - after a couple of weeks or so - becomes unresponsive, i.e. I cannot connect to the dashboard anymore. Having to send over a neighbor to unplug/replug it is a pain. Is there a way to get it to reboot after a certain amount of time? Or shall I simply connect it to a timer that disconnects the power every 24 hours for a couple of minutes?
The timer option is your best bet. But it would be best to figure out why it’s locking up. Are you running UI5? How many devices are you controlling? Running any plugins and if so which ones? It sounds like it might be running out of memory.
- Garrett
I’m just installing a vera lite about 500 miles away and am concerned about its reliability as well. I’ve been fooling around with a WeMo switch thinking that as long as I have an internet connection at the remote location I can at least cycle the power on the vera. I’ve heard the WeMo has its own issues but so far mine’s been working for a week. Time will tell but it’s an inexpensive solution ($50) if it ends up working. If the WeMo proves unreliable than the next option up is an internet connected plug strip. They look very reliable and are around $100. Obviously you want to try and solve the root problem but I’m finding it’s a good insurance polity to have some other means to cycle power.
Hi Nagyg & BeerGuy,
The best option to improve reliability IMHO is to install a brand new 1 GB USB 2.0 Kingston Data Traveller and pointing the logs to the device. Since doing this several months ago now, I have not had to do a reboot once.
IP Connected power strips are also good, but you would need a static IP for them, but they do work as well. This would work as an additional piece of mind.
Let me know how you get on.
Regards,
Mike
[quote=“mikewooduk, post:4, topic:174527”]Hi Nagyg & BeerGuy,
The best option to improve reliability IMHO is to install a brand new 1 GB USB 2.0 Kingston Data Traveller and pointing the logs to the device. Since doing this several months ago now, I have not had to do a reboot once.
IP Connected power strips are also good, but you would need a static IP for them, but they do work as well. This would work as an additional piece of mind.
Let me know how you get on.
Regards,
Mike[/quote]
I am intrigued but - at my level of knowledge about these things - I do not understand what I need to do to replicate your setup with the DATA stick. Could you please explain in more detail? Thanks!
[quote=“garrettwp, post:2, topic:174527”]The timer option is your best bet. But it would be best to figure out why it’s locking up. Are you running UI5? How many devices are you controlling? Running any plugins and if so which ones? It sounds like it might be running out of memory.
- Garrett[/quote]
UI4 and I have a camera and a Horstman Thermostat connected to it - that is currently all. I have also noticed, that sometimes I can re-connect to it again after a couple of days, that I usually can access the pictures from the camera even when VERA appears to be offline (takes a pic every 15 minutes - where do these get stored, on my VERA or on the Micasaverde Website? because there are lots of them …) and that sometimes power cycling it doesn’t help …
I have noticed that by putting VERA into the DMZ of my router and going to my routers IP address I can ALWAYS access it, even when it is unaccessible through the Micasaverde servers! So I assume the problem must be with the servers.
Having VERA in DMZ of cause totally exposes it to the WAN, as there seems to be no log in screen - it goes right to the dashboard. I tried port forwarding, but couldn’t set it up. What port would VERA respond to?
For goodness’ sake, stop doing that. Anyone else can access it too.
Search the forum for port forwarding for previous discussions, which usually result in a recommendation to set up a VPN server.
tell me about it … I found information on port forwarding. But when I go to the network settings and click on “advanced configuration” I need to login. My MIOS login data doesn’t work here - what do I need to enter?
The OpenWrt LuCI interface needs your Vera’s root account credentials. That’s the same password that you’d use to SSH into Vera, and it would have been the same as the password on the sticker on the underside of the Vera, unless you changed the password.
That said, there’s little in there that you will find useful. I just wanted to get you to stop letting any random stranger control your home, which is what you were doing by port forwarding.
To solve your original problem, I suggest that you involve Micasaverde support.
I don’t know how to SSH into my VERA. I deleted port forwarding and - needless to say - I’m not able to access it through the MIOS server (server busy msg). But I now understand that the MIOS servers are the problem. I will contact tech support, but from all the msgs I have seen while researching this, it is a common problem and I don’t have much hope. Are the MIOS servers that weak? I wish they would allow a setup with port forwarding to a password protected GUI page … VPN is not and option with the router in the vacation home.
I hardly experience issues with the mios forwarding servers. You’ll get downtime once in awhile, but it has been problem free for me.
- Garrett
I have a Vera 3 and I have seen problems with the MCV servers … but only when my WAN connectivity has problems. I live outside the city and Internet is delivered by two radio hops. I have multiple single points of failure in connecting me to the Internet backbone.
I have seen times when Vera does not realize it has lost connection to the MCV servers and does not reinitialize them. LAN operation is working fine, and I rarely need to control things when I am away from home. So I do not notice it right away.
Need to power cycle Vera when that happens to re-establish it’s links. There might be something less than the big hammer solution to this … but I have not investigated.
[hr]
There are routers that support VPN connections … but these are much more sophisticated than your typical residential router and require you to be much more network savvy. If you do not know about VPNs you are definitely not ready for this unless you have a friend, or you pay some one, to set this up for you.
You can just SSH directly to Vera remotely … then you would need to forward some port to port 22 on Vera. Port forwarding for an SSH connection is the only type of port forwarding you should do with a typical residential router. You can follow the same strategy that others have talked about setting up SSH/Putty on a LAN so you do not need a password. This is also safe through this tunnel … assuming your certificates are secured (As long as you secure the phone/pc that you use to remotely connect). You can then login remotely through the tunnel and reboot Vera.
Through that same tunnel … you can securely access your IP cameras and other resources on your remote LAN. But this also requires that you are some what network savvy to setup. In fact going this route, many 3rd party interfaces/applications can access your Vera securely without using the MCV servers.
Thanks for the advice. The router is provided by the fiber cable operator and I don’t want to switch it out as it also has the telephone connected to it. It’s WAN connection is very reliable because I can always access the web cams. Unfortunately I am on my way back home, so setting up SSH will have to wait - I remember reading that this can only be set up locally.
Before you leave if you port forward some arbitrary port like:
66622 and port fortward to port 22 on your Vera.
You can do the rest of the setup remotely … assuming you have the ssh password for your Vera.
[quote=“RichardTSchaefer, post:15, topic:174527”]Before you leave if you port forward some arbitrary port like:
66622 and port fortward to port 22 on your Vera.
You can do the rest of the setup remotely … assuming you have the ssh password for your Vera.[/quote]
He stated earlier that he doesn’t know how to SSH into Vera, so these comments are for someone else in the future.
Just a quick note, the highest possible port number is 65535.
Changing the SSH port number does reduce the amount of automated scanning attempts. It does NOT provide additional security.
VPN is the proper method.
Just to add a data point- I run a Vera2 on UI4 with a lot of nodes- (20+). No cameras. 3 tstats. It began to run really slowly about 6 months ago. I put a 1GB USB card in the back and changed the settings, and for the most part, it has been error free since.
I do have a question though- does the USB card have to be “cleared out” at any time, or does it just overwrite the existing data and go on?
[quote=“mikewooduk, post:4, topic:174527”]Hi Nagyg & BeerGuy,
The best option to improve reliability IMHO is to install a brand new 1 GB USB 2.0 Kingston Data Traveller and pointing the logs to the device. Since doing this several months ago now, I have not had to do a reboot once.
IP Connected power strips are also good, but you would need a static IP for them, but they do work as well. This would work as an additional piece of mind.
Let me know how you get on.
Regards,
Mike[/quote]
[quote=“RichardTSchaefer, post:15, topic:174527”]Before you leave if you port forward some arbitrary port like:
66622 and port fortward to port 22 on your Vera.
You can do the rest of the setup remotely … assuming you have the ssh password for your Vera.[/quote]
Back home, so this will have to wait. But I will get my self educated on SSH before my next trip …
Hi
Just wondering if anyone has any ideas re a similar problem I have started to see occurring with my Vera 2 / UI 5 in the last month or two. I have the latest firmware and approx 35-40 physical devices along with a handful of scenes.
My unit has gotten to the point where it requires power cycling almost daily, sometimes up to 3 per day. I have even restarted my unit and within an hour had to power cycle it again as it just stops responding. Scenes won’t activate via Minimotes, iVera times out on both of our iPhones etc. Twice I have also tried accessing the user interface via an iPad and after logging in I get an yellow screen with an error message advising it can’t contact Vera. As soon as the unit is power cycled and rebooted everything works fine again - but for how long is anyone’s guess.
On a few occasions I have put this down to server issues with MCV as I have tried to connect via iVera on my way home and it has timed out, yet when I get home and am connected to my LAN iVera connects and works perfectly. (My Internet hasn’t been down and everything has been working fine).
Has anyone had any similar issues to this? I am almost pulling my hair out as it is becoming very frustrating and leading to me think that the unit is very unreliable when it has more than a certain number of devices connected (Is my zwave network getting too big?) and got me thinking whether I should try other units, though I’d rather stick with what I have.
I have seen a post where someone stated they plugged a USB thumb drive into the USB port on their Vera and it fixed all the problems they were having with their unit becoming unresponsive. Has anyone else done this? Can I use any USB thumb drive? What do I need to configure in order to try this?
Hopefully someone is able to assist in shedding some light on this as I am almost out of ideas. :-p
Thanks in advance
My Vera 2 running 1.5.622 got very sluggish recently after adding some more plug-ins. I enabled the USB Logging about 2 weeks ago as decribed in the Wiki
I didn’t use a new flash drive but did reformat it to FAT although Vera reformats it anyway.
My Vera is significantly more responsive now and I have not needed to power-cycle or soft restart it since.
If you are using DataMine it gets a little more complicated and make sure to do a backup of the Datamine logs in case Vera decides to reformated that drive instead of the intended one.
You can also enable USB swapfiles (see Wiki) but that is a bit more work and I don’t feel I need to do it at present.