[Discussions] Possible improvments to cloud service for openhab

[matt1 (Skinah)]

I MISS having a server located closer to me for speed reasons. Not sure how hard it would be to have multiple server locations you can choose from?

[Bruce_Osborne]

Thanks for the correction and insight @digitaldan.

[stryjek4 (Rafał Drąg)]

I MISS an interactive notifications system, like it’s done in Home Assistant when you can react to notifications

[mstormi (Markus Storm)]

Just FWIW, you can build that using the telegram binding.

[ysc (Yannick Schaus)]

Probably a bit technical, but I MISS cookie-based authentication, as opposed to basic auth on home.myopenhab.org. Would solve a lot of problems with PWA features of the UI

Also an idea I had, not directly related to openHAB Cloud the software, but could be within the myopenHAB “brand”: the service could offer a dynamic DNS feature which would set up the TXT records necessary to perform a Let’s Encrypt DNS-01 challenge, in order to ultimately provide users with a valid TLS certificate to use on their LAN (and automatically assigned to the openHAB instance and renewed whenever appropriate). Home Assistant has something like that which uses an external service (duckdns.org), but in our case it would be something like bobsawesomehome.myopenhab.org pointing to 192.168.1.102 or whatever the local IP for the server is. Ideally the server would respond to those queries only for a select range of source IP addresses, so that it does not divulge an internal IP address to the internet at large.
Serving the web app over HTTPS by default unlocks a lot of useful features, but setting it up on your LAN is painful.

[Andrew_Rowe]

thanks @digitaldan for clarifying this because Bruce has been stating this for awhile and I kind of had been wondering if it was in fact true

@digitaldan

@Bruce_Osborne

I think the Foundation hopes somebody will host and charge a subscription for users so they will not be so resource constrained. the Foundation cannot charge for their services.

I would have to very much disagree with this statement. Speaking for the foundation, and as the primary maintainer of our service, we ask for help and volunteers to make our service better, but are not looking for others to commercialize a core part of our community.

[matt1 (Skinah)]

I LOVE: How myopenhab.org is run on donations and not a monthly fee that each user has to pay. Instead of 1,000’s of people all paying for their own hosted cloud which still costs for certificates and the upkeep. The power of sharing and being in a community.

As someone who does not work or connected in any way to the foundation, please consider subscribing at the link below so we all benefit from @digitaldan’s (and any other volunteers involved) hard work. Thank you.

openHAB Foundation e.V.

[Gonzalo_Echevarria]

Last year I set up my own cloud server. I setup correctly notifications in Firebase for Android and IOS, everything works perfectly. The code is quite easy to understand and can be modified as you like. I think the founders did an excellent job and each one could install it and adapt the functionalities to their needs

[BigMountainSki (Udo)]

Additionally: I would like to emphasise the possibility to use
the amazon smile program to donate to the openHAB foundation with every buy on amazon

[Kim_Andersen]

Hear you!!
I use it everytime I buy something at Amazon.de

[rednep (Geoff)]

I LOVE the Google assistant / Google Home integration

[rednep (Geoff)]

I would LOVE the ability to use the local cloud and connect to Google Home / Google Assistant using a simpler method

[Balazs_Benkovics]

I’d LOVE not seeing a lot of trash entries in my OH log related to cloud connector and mobile client activity.

[oliviercommelarbre]

I MISS being able to restrict the (BasicUI) sitemaps that can be accessed through the cloud connnector to only a subset of all available sitemaps

[llegovich (Luciano)]

I MISS being able to create a Client ID / Secret pair to allow REST API access via OAuth2 for custom applications.