Constant 4Mb/s upload traffic to openhab cloud

Apps & Services openHAB Cloud
1

I am still running OH 2.5 for device compatibility, OH is running fine, and I can access sitemaps locally
and remotely via OH Cloud.

Since I have changed my router, I can see the traffic per device more clearly and I found out that my OH server is constantly uploading some SSL traffic. Then I consulted the iftop on the Linux where OH runs and it became clear that the trafiic is going to Linode server, which seems to be OH Cloud. I verified that by disabling remote access in Paper UI services and the traffic stops.

So I thought someone must be viewing the sitemap on the app or in the browser, as when I open the app the traffic is up to 4Mb/s because the sitemap has a live camera feed on the first page. But a few days ago when I messed with disabling remote access, I tested that when I close the app, the traffic goes down to about 50b/s.

Then I thought I already fixed the issue as when I disabled Voice Assistants in the OH cloud, traffic also stopped, but only temporarily, today I noticed the traffic again, and nobody I know is using remote access now.

I am still unsure what is the cause, is it my sitemap that I know has some formatting errors(but is hard to find all errors as it has 3000 lines, tho it still works), is that causing errors on OH cloud and retransmitting traffic even when nobody watches it.

I also have a similar setup on Raspberry in our weekend loghouse, it also works fine, but it has traffic, when no one is accessing it. It has no live camera feed on sitemap tho, but it has some camera snapshots that refresh every 5s. The difference is that there I am running OH3.

Any suggestions appreciated, on what info I still need to share to give insights into the problem.
I understand that OH 2 is officially not supported, but I suspect that oh cloud shouldn’t be calling for data for no reason even if OH2 is the server.

Is it possible that some bot guessed my OH passwords and is constantly analyzing my data and camera feed, should I change all 5 passwords for all the users, it is tedious tho.

Is there a way to see on the OH cloud, who is using it to access my OH server?

Been using OH for over 3 years now, but still need to learn how it has to be configured so it works properly :sweat_smile:

Thanks,
Matej

2

When you login to the myopenhab website I believe it lists when the last time each user has accessed the cloud. Check against those times.

You can remove parts of the sitemap for testing to see if they cause the issue.

Do you have any items listed to be exposed to the cloud?

3

It looks like I have no items exposed to OH Cloud, according to Items to Expose being blank.

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But I have no idea where to find any login or user activity logs, I thought that I may see device activity time under “my devices” but there is no “last seen” entry there.

I may need to take a forensic approach to the sitemap formatting flaws, but other than that I haven’t seen any obvious related errors in openhab.log for the last day.

Since I removed Voice Assistants in the Cloud data upload isn’t happening all the time anymore, but something is still odd here as 13,8GB to OH Cloud in 2 days is still a lot, like I would be watching a sitemap with a video feed 4 hours/day. I guess iftop isn’t counting wrong as unifi controller showed almost the same traffic.

Is it possible that traffic keeps going to OH cloud if the session with the client app isn’t cleanly disconnected?

I will move the video live feed away from the main page on the sitemap, or also temporarily remove some sections of sitemap code to narrow down to the cause.

I will keep an eye on the traffic and report back my findings.

Thanks for the response :slightly_smiling_face:

4

I don’t know, however it would not surprise me if a mobile phone kept web pages running even when you lock the phone or move away from the web browser app. Its common for people to not know how to close an app and to have them still running in the background. I have not done tests so I really do not know.

Removing the video feed off the sitemap would be the best to see the effect. If you can narrow it down to X feature on your sitemap, you can then ask people if they have seen it before and give an example of how you are doing it on your sitemap.

I dont understand this statement. But you DO NOT need to expose any items to have voice assistants working, they use tags/metadata. Exposing items can send non stop data out depending on openHAB versions and I’m not sure if it was only disabled at the server/cloud end.

5

Disabling the visibility of video on a timer did the trick, seems like on the main page it kept going.

As I have a multi-switch for selecting what camera to watch I was able to automate it so it times out and hides video.

Previously sitemap sometimes crashed after a few minutes as it was constantly pooling video.
The app didn’t crash tho if I left it going but, it seems like some android devices keep it open in the background, but my phone stops it to save power so I didn’t notice that issue, so thanks matt for pointing that out.

Sems like the video was keeping the app running, and the app keeps playing video so it becomes perpetual until something stops it.

For the last day, data upload went to almost 0 so that is a good sign, I will see if now everything is under control or if any big data transfers will pop up again, indicating some other cause.

I understand that Voice assistants don’t need exposed items, as I never exposed any items, and voice assistant Google worked fine, but I suspected it was corporate to data hogging as I had 10 entries in OH Cloud Apps, as the google home connection stopped working I always just singed in again and now I assumed that all 10 connections were calling for status data for a bunch of items.

Thanks for the help matt, I had no clue where to look for traces as there were no logs for OH Cloud, and the transfer is SSL, hopefully, I solved that data-hogging OH Cloud connection for good now.