Hoping that someone can provide some guidance to help sort out the issues I have been having with my vera3.
After having a stable vera3 for couple of years I noticed that things were getting more and more unstable, without having added any more devices/scenes. I noticed that the vera3 was restarting 5-10 times a day, often when a PLEG condition has been met and the action involved a large number of devices (e.g. I have a button that turns almost everything off). Suspected that if could have been that PLEG plugins that had automatically updated and these were not longer compatible with UI5. I bit the bullet and upgraded from UI5 to UI7 in the hope that would help and although it upgraded OK the restart/reboot issues got much worse. It now restarts/reboots around 20 times/day. Pressing the button that (via PLEG condition) turns everything off causes the vera to restart or reboot 50% of the time. Even walking by motion sensors seem to make the vera restart. I’ve tried removing some devices (like camera etc) and deleting some scenes in the hope of making more memory available, but it hasn’t really helped.
I’ve attached logs but not sure where to start. Any advice would be gratefully received.
Try to check how much free memory your vera has.
I have a vera lite but it was using 259% memory allocation. After a while the memory would be full (with growing log files) and the vera would restart.
Solution? I have a vera plus now… with 4 times more memory.
Besides that, turning everything off with a button doesn’t need PLEG. A simple scene could do it? What is special about your PLEG condition?
hyzteric, thanks for the reply!
. >Try to check how much free memory your vera has.
How would I check how much free memory the vera3 has? And if it was consuming too much memory what would be best way to free some up? Things worked fine 2 years, but then became problematic, so suspect there is a memory leak in software or one of the plugins. I have it set the vera to log to USB and have tried new USB flash drive to no avail.
>>Besides that, turning everything off with a button doesn’t need PLEG. A simple scene could do it? What is special about your PLEG condition?
The wiring in my (12 year old) home does not have neutral wires all the way down to the light switches. Therefore I use fibaro dimmer switches for all the lights. In order to activate scenes I have other buttons connected to the s2 on the dimmer switch which control scenes via PLEG condition as per the solution described here http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php/topic,17409.0.html
Incidentally, I tried turning verbose logging on last night (in the hope of finding some more useful information in the logs). Doing so however, caused the Vera to restart consistently every 3 mins. So I turned verbose logging off again and although the vera restarted once after 10 mins it hasn’t restarted now for about 8 hours.
Yes, I have been using a flash drive for vera log files for a number of years. After upgrading to UI7 I also tried switching the USB drive for a new one, in case the previous one was faulty. A short period after inserting the new USB drive (I think the Vera automatically formats the drive) the USB status shows as enabled as per the attached pic. I’ve disabled all the general logging options (including the archiving to MiOS option)
I have never seen this before, but I would disable USB logging to see if the problem clears. I personally feel USB logging, at least on Vera3/UI5, is not worth doing in my setup, because while it frees up memory, it causes some delay and in my opinion those delays can be problematic.
Thanks all for the input. After having disabled and then re-enabled logging the restarts are less frequent. It is strange because I had done that before to no avail. Just a couple of restarts a day now, which is a bit more bearable.
I am sorry but there is something going on here that nobody is picking up on. Basically there are some dots not being connected. I am in the same boat. I had a super stable system. My logic worked awesome and everything was super fast to respond to conditions being met. Then I started having issues saving my PLEG changes which I reported here and since then there have been even more reports of the same and it has become a big issue here on the forum. Around that same time I noticed a lot of the same instability you are reporting. I am not very accustomed to looking at the log files so I opened a call with Vera Support and also started watching the logs a bit more and learning what it all means. My LUA reboots very regularly and every time I see it doing so I ask Vera Support to check the logs and they give me some different reason like the unit had trouble syncing accounts with vera or my PLEG is causing deadlocks.
In a different thread I spoke about the deadlocks and what I suspected may cause it. I got some good advice from Richard and others but since I can’t seem to save at all these days I had a hard time implementing the suggested changes. I went searching for an older firmware in hopes of being able to save my work but had compatibility issues when I sent back to far. So I ended up at 1.7.11 and had a somewhat better time saving changes. Had to go slow but got it done.
While working on all this I would have a putty window open tailing the logs. I noticed a pattern. Whenever I am in a PLEG device and trying to make changes the LUA would reboot on its own about every 5 minutes or so. When I was not in a PLEG device it did sometimes reboot but way less often and not on any kind of pattern line when I was editing a PLEG.
I am now convinced that something happened that caused PLEG to be unstable. I believe that the instability issues reported by you, myself and others are directly related to the issues of saving your work. I have been working in IT my whole life and one of my strong suites is troubleshooting issues. I am pretty good at putting pieces of a puzzle together and often when someone tells me no way it is ‘that’ it usually is ‘that’.
I am not a programmer and thus don’t have a solution. If this was a Windows network I could lean on my experience and figure out a solution.
My point here is to relay that I think this is being looked at in a one dimensional viewpoint when I see it differently. When troubleshooting technical issues it’s all about going down the right thought process. I don’t believe the current though process by Richard and Vera is the correct one based on my observations and instincts.
What I can offer is a work around in the meantime. A, try going to 1.7.11 as this made it easier for me to save PLEG configurations. My process is that I only change a small handfull of things at a time and then wait 2 plus minutes before saving. I tail the logs and if I see an LUA reboot before I reload the LUUP then I refresh and see what saved. B, Minimize your PLEG logic. Previously I had many triggers to an event and tried to make my lights as intuitive as possible. I scaled this back and that seems to have helped.
Wish I had better solutions but I am completely frustrated at this point.
I created a condition called Test2. I made the dumps you requested and they are in the attached PDF. I don’t see any sign of the condition in any of the dumps. I tried this twice with the same results.
Now if you can make a change and try a capture every couple of minutes to see if you ever see a “TEST2” in the captured stream … BEFORE you do a Reload.
I too have seen these problems the last couple of days. Before my Vera 3 was rock stable.
Triggers, conditions and actions are not saved. I have tested to wait a while before hitting Reload but the change won’t take. After reload when I go into PLEG and do a status check I get an error message saying “Error getting status of: ” where is the trigger I just tried to create.
Besides this Vera is slow in general and reboots a lot. Don’t know what could have changed lately. I haven’t upgraded OS version since I upgraded from UI5 to UI7. Has a new PLEG version been released the last week?
Upside - my problem with battery devices that stop responding is solved by the many reboots.
I am going to try and catch when the changes show up later but I am confident as to how it will go. The changes will show up around 2 minutes or so. LUA will reboot on its own at some point. The key is if LUA reboots before the changes are committed.
So two things need to be solved.
Why are the changes not being committed sooner?
Why is LUA rebooting on its own and so often?
The vera support rep said he saw that my system had issues syncing users and that caused some of the reboots. I wonder if some user sync issue is the root cause?
