Not asking you to change, just trying to understand so we aren’t talking cross purposes. Were the Manual Instructions on the link I provided not adequate or did you not see them in time? The main reason I ask is you should not have had to do any of the stuff you did to make it work following those instructions. They are essentially the same instructions (minus the username creation) for MacOS, Windows, and FreeBSD. CentOS is not that different as to make the instructions invalid.
The article on the Exec binding probably needs updating. The “old way” it is referring to is from OH 1.5 or thereabouts. The old way is all but OBE and the discussion of it should probably be removed from the wiki.
Indeed the “>” and “<” are not discussed. As I’m sure you already figured out, “>” means outgoing and “<” means incoming. An Item configured with “>” will call the script when it receives a command. An Item configured with “<” will call the script periodically (the second to last number in the examples on the wiki page) is the polling period in milliseconds.
One thing to note is that for the most part each binding defines its own syntax for the stuff that goes inbetween the { }. Consequently there is a lot of inconsistencies from binding to binding. This is getting better over time, especially with the changes in OH 2. But for legacy stuff there are no generic docs to help explain the binding configs. You have to go to each binding’s docs, and in this case clearly the Exec binding docs is in need of an update.
For the most part the default logging config should be adequate to at least discover problems. The logging documentation is in need of expanding. I made a first attempt with this posting.
And there are plans to have a troubleshooting section in the docs that would cover other common gotchas (e.g. making openhab a member of the dialout group, exec permissions, etc.). Lots to do, too few people doing it (myself included).
Logging state changes for Items are recorded in the events.log by default. Logs from Rules and bindings go to openhab.log. All get included when tailing the log on the karaf console.
This is troubling and concerning because this is the first I’ve seen posted here of someone unable to run from the included scripts.
Glad I could help. I’ve been on this forum long enough that I try to never interpret anything negatively. I hope I’m not coming across as angry or anything like that. I frankly want to get to the bottom of the problems you had because:
- they are unique, no one has reported such problems on this forum yet
- you are clearly technically proficient so I can discount a lot of ID-10T type problems and you are in a position to help us get to the root of the problem without playing 20 questions for a week
- if there is a problem on CentOS we need to get it fixed because your experience is wrong and it needs to be fixed.
That doesn’t seem right because if they were having errors, they should have logged at least something at the ERROR level rather than just failing silently.
What specifically were the errors and what did you do to finally get it to work?
Out of curiosity, did you attempt to follow the installation instructions in the docs I linked to above or did you “forge your own way”? I ask because if the instructions don’t work as written for CentOS we need to write new instructions that will work.