tazal

I exchanged some emails with Steve today and I think we came up with a reasonable solution to my situation. Message boards often focus on the negatives more than the positives so I thought I would throw a thanks out here to Steve reminding people that SH doesn't just ignore their customers after a sale. Thanks Steve!

Unfortunately right now I am using a single KPL button controlled with an ISY program to show if any of the garage doors are open as opposed to a single KPL button per door. If any door is open the button is lit. If there were no iolinc bugs another program would shut any open doors and be triggered by that same KPL button. I hate to dedicate 2 IOlincs per door (to separate sensor and relay) or dedicate an insteon device somewhere to each door for proper tracking. Hey at one time there was talk of having a virtual insteon device object supported in the ISY, that would help work around this ridiculous problem with the iolinc. Seems like UD does more to deal with device problems than smarthome but any thoughts on that? Thanks! Al

You are correct, the issue I'm concerned about is the status of the sensor following the relay. Right now I have a few of these set up in sensor only mode for garage doors and they seem to work reliably to give me a KPL "status" button that is on if any door is open. I was hoping to incorporate control of the doors next but if my status button gets confused it defeats the purpose. I hope SH figures out a fix and sends out replacement devices free of charge soon, I have a bunch of the dang things that are waiting for deployment. I wasn't aware of the sensor timeout bug, I'll go do some searching of the forums and get up to speed on that one. Thanks, Al

Re-reading this I am nervous that the "Status of IOLinc incorrect" is not actually a fix in 2.7.3 but text stating that there is a firmware issue that you cannot work around. If there is no known workaround for the firmware issue can anyone point me to a discussion about this firmware issue, hopefully one that involves smarthome. Thanks, Al

I guess I liked the idea of making it easy to turn on and off without finding a keypadlinc or interfacego device to do it. That said I guess I am starting to integrate my harmony 890 which is normally in the same room as the fireplace so I could probably wire it in series and have the wall switch be only the overriding enable/disable and not directly control the functionality. Given the current problems with the using an iolinc for both sensor and relay (UG!) that probably makes it feasible in the short term as well.

If the IOlinc (2450) ever gets fully functional could I use one of these to control my fireplace? I could leave the physical wall switch in place but connect that to the sensor on an IOlinc and then use the IOlinc relay to actually turn on the fireplace. My logic thoughts are to have the following two triggers to support local control: - if sensor goes from off to on then turn on relay - if sensor goes from on to off then turn off relay You could control the relay however you like from other scenes, etc and still have the ability to flip the local switch to turn the fireplace on or off. Worst case is the local switch is on or off and you turn the fireplace (via relay) on in another fashion. Now you have a regular switch on the wall that obviously doesn't match status requiring you to flip the switch on and then off, or vice versa, to turn the fireplace on or off. Does all this seem reasonable and is there something I could replace the physical switch with that might do a better job of not confusing a user seeing the fireplace on but the switch off?

MikeB answered several of your questions the same way I would, it's very common for phone carriers to allow different types of traffic with different kinds of data plans and certainly with different types of data connections (edge vs 3G). For instance, T-Mobile has at least 2 or 3 different access points (phone proxies) that they give you access to depending on your data plan and each provides different connectivity; one may be just for web traffic(ports 80 and 443) and one may be full IP traffic (all ports) to allow things like VPNs to work. The later would allow non-standard ports for things like webcams. I also agree that using a non-standard port is only going to help if a hacker is doing broad sweeps of many IPs, and maybe not even then. If they were looking at *your* IP for vulnerabilities they will easily can all ports. I use a wildcarded dyndns entry to point *.my.domain at my public IP address. I have my router forward ports 80 and 443 to a linux box running apache where I serve up some web pages. In my apache configuration I have virtual sites listed and redirected to various internal IP addresses according to the HTTP header. It gets a little complicated to understand the first time but it allows me to do things like have my isy and my webcam both run on port 80 and then get to them from the internet via isy.my.domain and webcam.my.domain. Probably more hassle than you are looking for but possible and it allows me to only use port 80 and 443 so even a trimmed down phone connection works. In the last example my isy and webcam would think the traffic is coming from the internal network, my apache server specifically. It's like have two sets of translations, one NAT based on the firewall/router and another HTTP based in apache.

This smells a little like an argument and I definitely don't want to be in the middle of that. javascript:emoticon(':P') That said maybe I can clear up one concept. If you have a high speed internet connection you have a cable modem or DSL router (loosely named but generally accepted) and that device gets 1 IP address assigned to it. You can see this by hitting one of the many web sites that will identify this for you, the first one google found was http://whatismyipaddress.com/ Hit that address from multiple computers on your home network and you will see the same address. This is your public IP address. Each device on your network has a private ip address, to see your private IP address, the one your home network knows about but nobody on the internet knows about, or can get directly to, you can do something "ipconfig /all" in windows. Note, IP addresses are generally either static or dynamic. A static IP address is one that you set up and it never changes, a dynamic one is usually controlled by DHCP, which is a service that dynamically assigns IP addresses as requested. This is common and is a service that could run in multiple places, maybe a server at your ISP to assign your public IP address and maybe a device on your home network to assign your private IP address, such as the device described in the next paragraph. Many people use a "wireless router" or similar device to allow them to connect more than one device to their high speed internet connection. It uses a technology called NAT (Network Address Translation) to do this. It makes all traffic to the internet appear to come from the wireless router (the 1 public IP address you have is associated with it) and then the router handles sending replies back to the proper machine on your internal network. Now lets say a connection comes from the internet to your router via your public IP address. It has no idea where to send it (keep in mind all of your email, web, etc are initiated from a machine inside the network, not from the internet) so by default it just drops it. Let's say you have a web server inside your network that you want to be able to connect to from the internet. You configure your router to pass traffic on port 80 and 443 to the private IP address inside your network. If you do not set that up, commonly called port forwarding, then the router doesn't know where to send the inbound traffic and it drops. This means that a random device behind your router/firewall is not directly accessible from the internet, the router wouldn't know which device the connection is intended for. Some devices will actually interact with your router to set up port forwarding, a slingbox for instance does this very well, but it's something that you need to initiate, usually from the device management interface. That was a pretty generic description but hopefully it helps someone understand the topic a little better. If you are a highly technical person and in the mood to argue we can take it elsewhere, this was meant as a high level description to those who don't understand NAT.

No problem on the delay, I know you're busy. I didn't know if there was something I was missing or not, I just got my first ISY recently, so far so good! Thanks!

I want to change the ramp rate of some lights for all switches in a virtual 4-way light based on some conditions. I can use a program with "Set Scene" to change the ISY based scene to have a new ramp rate but I would like to automatically "Copy Scene Attributes" to the switches involved. For the non-load switches I could use an ISY trigger to initiate the scene with the desired ramp rate but that leaves the load switch still functioning with a different ramp rate and I would rather have the ISY push all new ramp rates and use insteon links instead of hopping through the ISY if possible. If I go to each switch involved and "Copy Scene Attributes" after the program updates the ISY scene then this is the functionality I am looking for, I just want it automated each time that condition is met. Thanks!