Howdy,

Running an ISY994iZ v5.0.14 for a few years with success.  Recently (last 2 weeks), noticed that zwave communication has been getting a bit unreliable (like seemingly dropping about 20% of commands).  I've not added any new zwave devices and my space is both pretty small (950 sq ft single floor condo) and well meshed (several secure repeaters and powered devices with repeaters).  I have the original zwave controller on my ISY (I think 300 series? - whatever was the option about 6 years ago).  ISY is on conditioned power (UPS)

Looking at the event viewer, I'm seeing this 

Tue 12/13/2022 06:20:55 : [ZW-DB /CONF/0079.CZW] sizeof(UZWCmdClassEntry) too small (4 < 54)
Tue 12/13/2022 06:20:55 : Add Node failed: Cannot initialize device database for new device

repeated every few minutes, sometimes by itself, sometimes repeatedly over a few seconds.  Thing is, I don't have that many ZWave devices and the highest ZWave ID I can find on my ISY is 19 (ZW019_1). 

So I do not know where device 79 is coming from. 

I've rebooted the ISY994iZ twice now, both times letting it finish it's initial poll.  I've done a full ZWave heal as well as used the Synchronize Node for each Zwave device.  

The message and, I assume related, zwave unreliability remain though.

Normally, when the zwave stuff goes "bad", there is some wonky zwave related message in the event viewer and a reboot clears it.  But obviously, whatever this is, it's not that.

Any suggestions for how to at least clear this error (with the hope that the controller dealing with this is responsible for my occasional dropped zwave commands)?
 

Gerry

1 hour ago, gduprey said:

Howdy,

Running an ISY994iZ v5.0.14 for a few years with success.  Recently (last 2 weeks), noticed that zwave communication has been getting a bit unreliable (like seemingly dropping about 20% of commands).  I've not added any new zwave devices and my space is both pretty small (950 sq ft single floor condo) and well meshed (several secure repeaters and powered devices with repeaters).  I have the original zwave controller on my ISY (I think 300 series? - whatever was the option about 6 years ago).  ISY is on conditioned power (UPS)

Looking at the event viewer, I'm seeing this 

Tue 12/13/2022 06:20:55 : [ZW-DB /CONF/0079.CZW] sizeof(UZWCmdClassEntry) too small (4 < 54)
Tue 12/13/2022 06:20:55 : Add Node failed: Cannot initialize device database for new device

repeated every few minutes, sometimes by itself, sometimes repeatedly over a few seconds.  Thing is, I don't have that many ZWave devices and the highest ZWave ID I can find on my ISY is 19 (ZW019_1). 

So I do not know where device 79 is coming from. 

I've rebooted the ISY994iZ twice now, both times letting it finish it's initial poll.  I've done a full ZWave heal as well as used the Synchronize Node for each Zwave device.  

The message and, I assume related, zwave unreliability remain though.

Normally, when the zwave stuff goes "bad", there is some wonky zwave related message in the event viewer and a reboot clears it.  But obviously, whatever this is, it's not that.

Any suggestions for how to at least clear this error (with the hope that the controller dealing with this is responsible for my occasional dropped zwave commands)?
 

Gerry

I'd start by updating your controller to a more recent release as there could be bugs in your firmware. 

Verify if you have the 300 or 500 board. 300 has a blue light in the back of the isy. 500 does not. 

If 300 upgrade to 5.0.16c and if you have 500, upgrade to 5.3.4.

You can find both under the software releases and updates section

Thanks for the reply!  Appreciated.

I'm holding off changing the firmware as I've been running the same firmware for a while now without problems (and I use the same version on the 7 other ISYs I manage).  Looking over the release notes, I'm not seeing anything suggesting there was a change in there, so avoiding adding more variables to the mix for the moment.

My gut says this is a corruption issue.  I've had one other system before that had similar (but not the same) issue and it was a corrupt SD card.  I was able to reformat and restore and all was well.

But this being ZWave and knowing the ZWave dongle sort of lives in it's own world, I'm a little leery to just restore.  I guess it would be helpful to know if that error is from the ISY reading a config file from it's internal SD card (the pathing looks similar to how other ISY data is stored) or is coming from the ZWave controllers internal storage.

If it's the former, I can prolly try a reformat and restore as that won't touch the ZWave internal storage.  But if it's the later, then I'm looking at maybe a ZWave controller restore and those scare me (mostly because of disassociation from locks and stuff that seems to be a potential risk in those cases).

Can anyone from UDI comment on where that corrupt file might be coming from and let me know if the above hypothesis might apply?

Thanks!!

Gerry

On 12/13/2022 at 9:26 AM, gduprey said:

Can anyone from UDI comment on where that corrupt file might be coming from and let me know if the above hypothesis might apply?

Only way to get directly support from Universal Devices is to open a support ticket. While they do monitor the forums and help from time to time the likely hood of getting specific support here is a lot less than if you open a support ticket. 

https://www.universal-devices.com/my-tickets

While I can understand your hesitation to updating the firmware as @lilyoyo1 suggested it's probably not a bad thing to consider doing once you get things sorted out. There appear to be a lot of "bug" fixes between 5.0.14 and the last 5.x update for z-wave 300 controllers (5.0.16C). It's possible not every bug was commented on (especially if it wasn't an identified bug at the time).