VERA 2 becoming unresponsive

I have mine set to power cycle every 24 hours and sometimes that brings VERA back, but not very often. I have only 3 Fibaro roller shutter controlers and a thermostat attached to it. I have started attaching lights but I have deleted the sole dimmer from the unit because at this point it is pretty much useless.

I discovered that by putting the VERA into DMZ or port forwarding to 80 I can ALWAYS access the unit.

I have contacted tech support, but they need me to be at the unit in my vacation home, which I won’t be until my next vacation. So far VERA has been a huge disappointment and a waste of a lot of money. Here in the US I have been using X10 for at least a decade and it has been working great. Also, my NEST thermostats never give me any problems. Unfortunately neither of these concepts are available for Europe (but rumor has it that NEST is working on a European version).

By the way, I have had these problems right from the start and thought first, that it must be an internet connectivity issue. After installing a Foscam web cam, which was always accessible, I realized that the problem must be VERA. Now I believe it is their servers.

If they could allow port forwarding to a login protected GUI page on VERA I could bypass the MICASAVERDE servers.

[quote=“nagyg, post:21, topic:174527”]I have mine set to power cycle every 24 hours and sometimes that brings VERA back, but not very often. I have only 3 Fibaro roller shutter controlers and a thermostat attached to it. I have started attaching lights but I have deleted the sole dimmer from the unit because at this point it is pretty much useless.

I discovered that by putting the VERA into DMZ or port forwarding to 80 I can ALWAYS access the unit.

I have contacted tech support, but they need me to be at the unit in my vacation home, which I won’t be until my next vacation. So far VERA has been a huge disappointment and a waste of a lot of money. Here in the US I have been using X10 for at least a decade and it has been working great. Also, my NEST thermostats never give me any problems. Unfortunately neither of these concepts are available for Europe (but rumor has it that NEST is working on a European version).

By the way, I have had these problems right from the start and thought first, that it must be an internet connectivity issue. After installing a Foscam web cam, which was always accessible, I realized that the problem must be VERA. Now I believe it is their servers.

If they could allow port forwarding to a login protected GUI page on VERA I could bypass the MICASAVERDE servers.[/quote]

Thanks Nagyg

I’d be reluctant to put my Vera into DMZ and open myself up to any more security threats but tend to agree that MCV servers on more than one occasion have been the cause of my problems - not that they are are coming forth and advising of same.

I think if I had to go to the extreme of setting up timers to power cycle my Vera it would very quickly be gathering dust in with all my other old PC equipment. I didn’t pay the amount of money I did for such an unreliable device. Hopefully I can resolve my issue though before it gets to that. :slight_smile:

I have been in two minds with respect to your conclusion on many occasions. Without the support and help of many of the other forum members (for which i have been really grateful for on many occasions) I would have been totally lost! Unless you have experience in programming etc then Vera and or it’s UI in its current form just doesn’t cater for the everyday user once they get past adding a module to turn a light on and off unless the forum members were available and willing to help.

Will give the USB logging a whirl and see how I go. Thanks :slight_smile:

[quote=“Frasier, post:20, topic:174527”]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.[/quote]

Thanks Frasier, sounds promising.

I have a few thumb drives lying around so I will give it a try and see how things turn out

Thanks for your help :slight_smile:

EDIT:

Found a spare 1gb USB drive, formatted it and followed the instructions on the wiki with no joy. I have tried it 3 times now and on each occasion waiting almost double the 20 minutes the unit says to wait. I am almost about to give up after the 3rd time now.

I got the “yellow screen of death” within the Vera UI after waiting for it to do its thing. nothing. I know it did say it may not work after the first attempt but I would have thought 3 times should be plenty :-/

Not sure what else to try. Guess I will power cycle the unit and give up…for now

had this too with a usb stick i used for windows installation. it worked after i made it RAW partition so it removes bootloaderstuff and partition layout. vera formats it anyways.

Thanks Da_JoJo

I went and bought another new USB stick - this time a San disk - and tried it again, first time round it failed but on the second attempt everything finished OK.

So far there has been a marked improvement in the performance of devices and accessibility of Vera.

Although once it completed successfully I did loose all functionality of my devices and had to restore from backup twice and then leave it to perform 2 full heals overnight before things started to work again.

Fingers crossed it stays that’s way:-)

Not meaning to hijack your thread, but does anyone know if the USB stick has to be purged of data at any time, or does it purge itself after it fills up?

i guess it purges automaticly. after running vera for 1.5 year now i have my 4GB sandisk usb-stick filled up for 15% so i guess it’ll take a while to fill it up

In theory it purges, and in practice it does most of the time.

In mine, it’s accumulating some stuff, and needs to be manually fixed up from time to time, since the “purge” isn’t eliminating all of the historical stuff all of the time.

For mine, I suspect that something happens during the purge process, and it doesn’t restart.

ie. It OS-level reboots after the “compression” phase, but before the “upload” and “delete” phases.

… but that’s a guess based upon [recent] observed behavior (1.5.622)

;D

Don’t know what Julian Minut from tech support did, but it appears to be fixed!!!

[quote=“nagyg, post:29, topic:174527”];D

Don’t know what Julian Minut from tech support did, but it appears to be fixed!!![/quote]

:frowning: worked for a day; today i am getting the “server busy” msg again …

I have now setup remote SSH access and I can access the VERA2 directories. I have no idea how I can operate my VERA through SSH commands. Can anyone point me to a guide?

Thanks!

in vera you could use curl to open the UI commands on the vera locally as http request
or see here : ZWave Debugging - MiOS