I decided to start a new thread as I have practically decided like many to migrate from the vera to a different solution but which one?
Most have gone to Homeseer which is an expensive but reliable solution and very few other minuses.
Vera Symptoms:
- Occasional lag or drop of zwave commands and sensor status updates
- Random Luup reloads and sometimes full reboot of the vera.
I have shared some of my findings digging into the code inside the vera on my other thread:
Bottom line is that on my network, The Vera Plus I/O interface is overwhelmed and the CPU could not keep up with the combination of traffic from the zwave and zigbee UARTs, processing lua codes and plugin codes, output the outcome of the code logic back to the zwave/zigbee UARTs, listening to the Luup API, update the MIOS servers (event servers, remote access relays, device servers, storage servers, logging servers, account servers and occasionally firmware servers, support servers and energy servers for those who use it)
I attempted improve stability by removing all of the luup logic and plugin from the vera to openLuup and cutting off the mios server traffic by firewalling it:
-The remote access relay is a constant SSH tunnel which I successfully killed. It is the largest source of I/O access and potential crash when the responses are corrupted or access is compromised.
-The storage server access can be disabled by stopping the logs from being archived on the mios server (option in the UI)
-Not sure what the storage server does and have not dug into it. I suspect it is the server which sync files whenever we have deleted files showing up on the unit.
-The account server is disabled by removing the vera from your mios account
-The other 3 are on demand and are therefore not a concern.
The more problematic ones are the event and the device servers I have so far not been able to disable after working with CC for over a week:
- The device server calls still happen but at least do not cause the vera a heartburn when it can’t access it.
- The event server which normally reports alerts and notifications on the other hand is designed to write files, keep all the alerts and continuously retry to access the mios event server and eventually as I found out crash the vera. It is the single design flaw preventing the vera from working without mios server access as it eventually will stop executing lua code and go in infinite luup reload loops when the storage is full and it spends all its cpu time trying to send these accumulated events.
With the relay tunnel removed and keeping it online so as to avoid the event server triggered crashes, my vera has become a lot more responsive but I am still occasionally seeing userdata corruptions and sensor status misses as well as still inexplicable luup reloads.
Given how much I have invested in lua and the entire vera setup, rather than starting from scratch, I have decided instead to try to work with the vera and improve its reliability. Though it has improved significantly I have come to the point of testing 3 other platforms on a test network:
- Home Assistant with the HUBZB on which I now have both Zigbee(through bellows) and Zwave (through openZwave 1.4 at the time of writting though I have also installed openZwave1.5 with OZWCP for more advanced tasks) I got this stick with a hubitat. SDK v 4.5
- Zway with it’s own UZB and a license. SDK v 6.51
- Vera Edge running with a Homeseer USB stick (also recognized as a UZB). The thought was to run a test to see how far I would go and move the stick to a different platform. SDK v4.5
Something quirky: I have not been able to run a controller shift from one controller to another since they all somehow joined the network as primary.
All three controllers are able to control the one switch in the network and all report power consumption correctly.
Pros and Cons:
The vera is the buggiest one: It sees only one of the other two controllers and created 16 dimmer child devices of the zway controller. It has very questionable handling of secure classes as it appears to often fail exchanging keys.
Zway to which I am biased due to the existence of plugin for openLuup has its own bugs with the need to complete the device interview process for them to show up on the API. It offers the best control of the network with the ability to assign SUC/SIS to other controllers. Oddly Zway shows to be primary role “yes” and primary capability as “no”.
OpenZwave itself also offers a lot of options though not to the level of Zway is also very good with Home Assistant. It already supports a lot of devices and may have some support gaps to vera (I heard the garage door openers for example)
My big problem right now is to be able to run a controller shift with the secure class given the fact that all my controllers included as primary. It maybe that I will have to exclude and reinclude all of my secure class devices on my production node.
Edit:
I am having some interesting times here with the 3 controllers. I somehow managed to make the zway drop its primary role and have been playing dominoes with primary/secondary since. It appears so far that zway and vera are able to shift their primary out to another controller and maybe openZwave too but the only openZwave is capable of receiving the primary controller shift.