apostolakisl

Actually, those do all look like fake news.

Look, here is the deal. The answer was NO. NO. It wasn't anything else but NO.

I contacted my insurance agent (Farmer's) to inquire if Farmer's would deny a claim because of connecting the alarm system to home automation/internet in the event that this was related to a failed alert. She got back to me with a definitive "no", the claim would not be denied. I would point out that this is HOME automation. Not military, banking, high value commercial automation. Those policies would be written differently and likely require that certain protocols be followed. The fact that I have a myriad of ways to turn on my alarm system means my alarm actually gets turned on. As I think you implied earlier, this is in all likelihood the most common reason that an alarm fails to detect an intrusion When I leave my teenage kids home alone, I can arm "stay" even though I am leaving by pushing a button in my car, or I can arm away if no one is there. A button next to my bed instantly arms to night mode. I can arm my alarm from my harmony remotes, or I can tell Alexa to arm it. All together, this means that my family and I pretty much always use it. To fear an internet guru hacker is interested in hacking my alarm and then actually robbing me just doesn't strike me as being in the top 100 ways I might have a home intrusion. If I were hacked, I would imagine it would be some looser in Russia or something getting his jollies with no intention of actually coming to my house.

I was just playing with the additional user configuration. I can't get it to work. I have always used my admin user/password and that works fine. But when I tried to setup additional users . . . no go. I click on file, setup userid/password, user 1. I enter a username and a password twice. It asks me to confirm. I confirm. I logoff and try to logon with those credentials and it says failure. If, the user and password did work, what is the value in having additional users? Are these users restricted from changing settings? I'm on 5.0.8. And yes, the UI is also 5.0.8. I checked the user manual pdf and wiki and I find nothing about the additional users.

First off, the only security system that works is the one that gets turned on. The easier it is to use, the more it gets used. While connecting your panel to the internet opens a small window of opportunity for those who might do you harm, it closes a huge hole that exists when you don't use the panel at all because it is inconvenient. So to a purist, perhaps this is blasphemy, but in real life, it is what works. But furthermore, I'm not sure you understand how this works. 1) Alexa does not get your alarm password 2) Alexa does not even communicate with your alarm 3) ISY communicates with your Alarm 4) IF ISY has no program on it to disarm the Elk, then there is nothing you can do to remotely trigger ISY to disarm it unless you actually hack into ISY 5) Even if you did have a program on ISY that disarms Elk, someone would have to know the ISY API and which program to trigger (Alexa would know this if you programmed Alexa to know it, which is why I don't) 6) Elk created the XEP and intends it to be used as it is being used in this example. 7) Anybody who owns a webpage you have ever gone to, knows your IP address, and if they were a store where you put your address to ship you something, then they know which IP goes with which physical address, nothing unique to Alexa/Amazon here. If you use ISY portal, you don't even need to open any ports. 9) Professional Elk installers will open ports so they can manipulate your panel remotely, per actual Elk policy. In short, Elk is a respected security platform and none of this stuff is a hack on the Elk, it is all as intended. An insurance denial as you claim is quite unlikely for a homeowner. Even if you actually gave out your password, like to your cleaning lady, on purpose, and she robbed you, your insurance would not be denied. Or if you didn't turn your alarm on at all, or you didn't turn your alarm on and didn't lock your door, your insurance would still cover you. Home owners insurance does not stipulate precision use of UL listed security system to cover a homeowners policy.

My point is. . . RELATIVE RISK Connecting your security system to an IP backbone using standard encryption technology is going to be way down that list of relative risk. There are just SOOOO Many things you should be considering before that when it comes to security. Doing obviously silly things with that IP connection is no different than doing silly non-tech things like leaving your key under your doormat. It doesn't make the lock bad.

I'm not entirely sure what your end point here is. ISY and Elk shouldn't be connected? Amazon Echo shouldn't be connected to an ISY? ISY shouldn't have programs that respond to Echo? ISY shouldn't have programs that respond to Echo and execute something on Elk? Your examples above are true, mostly obvious situations where someone chose to do so something with a high probability of failure. In short, life is all probability. Whether you connect your Elk to ISY/Echo/Wahtever or not, there is always a probability of failure. In short, once you connect your Elk to the internet, you have crossed the bridge of an internet hack. I doubt that adding a link to ISY changes that probability in any realistically significant way. Personally, I would avoid giving echo a path to disarm the system cause it seems like yelling at echo to disarm your system will at some point be heard by someone who will now be able to shut off your system too. Once Elk is on the internet, adding an ISY link seems pretty trivial. If you are so in desperate need of security, there are a lot more likely failure pathways having nothing to do with your automation connectivity. The simple fact is, home alarms have response times of at least 10 minutes to cops there. That is lots of time to get yourself killed/kidnapped, or get a bunch of stuff stolen. And the bad guy needs nothing but a good kicking leg. Circumventing a home alarm system would be easier to do by just showing up at the house with basic knowledge of how they are installed rather than trying to hack it through IP.

Javi, Thanks for pointing that out. I got it working. Not sure how much I need to worry about security. Add a self-signed certificate? Not sure how hard that is. Change the port? Not sure that really does anything. Or, do nothing? Not sure if pointing port 80 to EG webserver opens up much of an opportunity to hack the network. The html pages I have written are super basic. Just displays a message, with 2 hyperlinks, so that I can trigger 2 different macros on EG. EDIT: I have to say, this webserver is looking like a bit of fun. You can turn your phone in to a remote control for your computer pretty easily and quite responsively. If only I was better at creating web pages.

I port forwarded it. (it being port 33333 of the remote router directing to the LAN IP, port 33333 of the EG computer)

I am trying to trigger a computer running event ghost that is not on my lan. I can't seem to get it working. I have no probs triggering computers within my lan using ISY/EG. What I did 1) Port forwarded 33,333 to the LAN IP of the computer running EG (the remote computer) 2) Set ISY to send a UDP to the WAN IP address of the remote network computer, port 33333 3) test it and nothing happens. I am using essentially the exact setup that works when EG and ISY are on the same LAN, I copied my network resource and then changed the host to the WAN of my remote computer. I copied the event ghost tree from the LAN computer to the remote computer, so all of those settings are identical. I was able to self trigger EG on the remote computer, for whatever that is worth. I can confirm that the port forward is working as I tried an experiment by setting remote desktop to listen on port 33333 and I could connect. What could I be missing here?

It sounds like you either need to subscribe to a dynamic dns service (like dyndns or no-ip) or get ISY portal. If power went out and your home gateway was assigned a new ip by your ISP upon reboot, there is nothing that ISY can do about that. A dynamic DNS company keeps track of your current WAN IP address by running an application on some device inside your network that informs the dynamic dns server of your current WAN IP every time it changes. Many routers have this application built in, as does Elk XEP. The dynamic dns company allows you to assign a URL to your home and it translates that URL into whatever your current IP is. Your URL choice is limited to the format they provide you, unless you want to buy your own. For example, a URL might be joe-blow.no-ip.biz where the "joe-blow" part was of your choosing. ISY portal service works by a plug-in on the ISY that opens a connection to the ISY portal. Because the connection originates at your end, the fact that your home IP address changed doesn't matter. The portal is owned and operated by UD on some server somewhere and its address never changes, so both you and your ISY can always find it on the internet. The service costs $50/2 years which allows UD to operate the server. The portal then relays all communications between you (when you are outside your home) and your ISY. As far as your LAN. You can configure your ISY to have a fixed IP, but be sure to keep good records of what you have assigned to what address. If you duplicate and address you will have problems. Also, you must set your router's DHCP to a range that does not include the IP addresses you are assigning your ISY (and other stuff). Generally speaking, assigning devices fixed IP's within the device is not the best way to do it. The best way to keep a LAN device on the same IP is typically to use a feature most routers have. This is called DHCP reservation, and it allows you to set your router to always provide any given device the same IP. In this case, you leave your ISY set to receive a DHCP address from your router. Your router will then always give it the same address, the address you told it to give it in the dhcp reservation configuration page. The router will recognize your ISY by its MAC address and it is the MAC address that you use to configure the router's reservation.

Can you arm/disarm from the ISY main console? Perhaps try going to config/elk and hit refresh topology. I too have Echo set to arm system. I see no security flaw in this. I suppose if you had no keypads in your house to see the red light and just trusted that it happened, you might be trusting too much. But I say "amazon trigger alarm on" and it turns on and I see red lights on all my keypads. If you had no keypads visible you could easily write a rule in elk to do something when it becomes armed to confirm that it got the message. Like send a text or chirp the siren or speak something or who knows what else.

I built an 8 outlet controller, but this thing would be easier. I wrote it up in here a while ago. I used a 4 gang electric box, 4 duplex receptacles with the tab that ties the two outlets together broken off, and wired each outlet to one relay each. Then I used my CAI webcontrol board to control the 8 relays. I had to use a relay board with the opto-isolated deal that only draws minimal current since cai can't power the 30mA or so that relays pull. Anyway, I wrote code on the CAI itself that controls the 8 outlets. The purpose is to turn on the outlets on a schedule with each one having an external hard drive attached. This was for running backups, one for each day of the week, with the hard drives powered off while not doing a backup. I could have also used the ISY network module to turn the CAI outputs on/off (and thus the relays) if I had wanted. Comparing what I did to the controller I started off this thread with. 16 vs 8 relays, cheaper (less then 1/2 the price per relay), only controllable externally (web) vs either local programming or external.

I actually pulled out the relay boards with those same songle relays. They are 10a 120vac rated NO/NC. It would seem that the relay board and the webcontrol board are 2 separate pieces. The webcontrol board is less liked than the relay board as I read comments. Looks like you should be able to control with ISY network module simply sending http commands. Example: http://192.168.1.4/30000/00 turns relay 1 off. http://192.168.1.4/30000/01 turns relay 1 on. So you have to divide by 2 since the relays get consecutively numbered with 2 commands per relay. And it looks like you need 12v to power the relay board and 5v to power the web board. The 12v part is pretty much 100% correct as I have similar boards and I know for a fact the relay coils use 12v

Based on the photos of the relays, which appear to be the same as relays I have on other things, as well as the screw terminals, they are spdt (both normally open and normally closed options, and are 10amp each.

I accidentally came across this on ebay http://www.ebay.com/itm/SainSmart-Web-TCP-IP-10A-Relay-Remote-Control-Kit-with-Network-Web-Server-16-/262734678764?hash=item3d2c350aec:g:bQ8AAOSwImRYOLx1 16 relay board with an IP interface. I would expect that with the network module you would be able to control these relays with ISY avoiding Insteon issues and getting a nearly instant response. I haven't actually tried this, but you certainly aren't going to find a cheaper way to have 16 relays run by ISY.

So my son ordered a dvd which we did not catch, and then he ordered the pig, which we did catch. I had turned off the voice ordering feature on our first echo, but didn't realize you have to turn it off for each one and we had purchased a second one. It is now off as well. But here is the funny thing. A news story was done on tv about a girl who ordered a very expensive doll house on alexa. So when they did the tv report and spoke the words, people who had echo's in ear shot of their tv started ordering doll houses. My wife just filled me in on the details. Apparently, he asked her for the pig first, she said no of course. Then, 15 minutes later he returned to tell my wife "it's ok mommy, I asked amazon in your office, and she said yes".

We had some stuff show up from Amazon that we didn't order. ??? Then today, my wife witnessed my 3 year old order a piggy bank from Amazon using Alexa. I would not have thought that would be active by default. Of course my 3 year old thought he was ordering a live pig. Good thing Amazon doesn't sell those.

25 year old washers didn't spin like the new ones. The new ones haul ***, originally it was just the front loaders, but now the top loaders do also. Part of the "eco friendly" thing where it extracts more water out of the clothes so they don't need to spend so long in the dryer. And it does work pretty well.

It's not all that surprising though. The high speed spin cycle is freakin fast. Throw an unbalanced load in there and all you need is a failure of the "unbalanced load detector" and that bugger has no prayer of staying in one piece.

I've got two Samsung washers. Front load though. Best washing machines I have ever owned. Hopefully it won't explode on me.

You use one of your open relays and connect 3 wires. NO, common, NC. The NC and NO can connect either way, you just write your Elk program (or ISY program) to accommodate what you wrote. In other words, you either turn the Elk output on to open the valve, or you turn it on to close the valve. As a fail safe measure, you might go with turning the output on to open the valve. In this way, if the relay dies, it probably will fail such that the valve closes. The elk has a 4th wire that is a signal wire that is optional. This powers on when the valve is, I think, open. You can connect that to a zone (but you don't have any). Some of the keypads have a zone on them, so you could theoretically open up a zone on your panel by switching something over to a keypad.

A hardwired connection to your Elk is pretty fail safe. Insteon communications are not nearly as reliable. Of course if you are using Insteon water detectors you still have comm issue potential there. There is no special compatibility regarding and Elk valve used with an Elk relay vs some other brand. ElkWSV needs a single pole double throw relay (normally open and normally closed connections). Other brands probably have the same requirement. I have my elk wsv wired to my elk panel and have the water turn off 30 minutes after the system is armed to away mode, plus I have hard wired water detectors throughout the house. I also have one at my office that works the same, except it shuts the water off immediately since my office alarm system isn't smart enough to have options like wait 30 minutes.

MWareman meant to say "event driven" not "even driven". A typo that would be challenging to figure out. Basically it means you have to think in sense of triggers. In the below example at least one of the 2 conditions must be a triggering item and the programs would only run when the trigger event happens. Either that or the programs below would need to be externally triggered (ie a 3rd program that says "run if" of these programs as part of its then/else clauses. For example, if a condition where the "status" of a switch, the trigger would be a change in the status of the light. If the condition were a "control" of a switch, it would require that someone physically acted upon the switch (pushed it in some way). As mentioned, 2 programs If condition 1 and condition 2 Then do x Else blank If not condition 1 and condition 2 Then y Else blank

This is a little off topic from what you are saying but in the same line. I was looking at some example code that has been written for Amazon to control DirecTV receivers. It appears that you can avoid the IFTTT thing alogether and go direct from a custom Alexa skill to your ISY. Based on my first run through, it looks like you can parse everything directly and substitute variables. For example, you might say, Alexa change channel to <name of channel here or number> and it will either plug in the number you say or look up the name you say and substitute the number. In my mind this is the best way to work all of this as it has the least number of moving parts.