Interested in hardware

[rlkoshak (Rich Koshak)]

@Paul_Atkin

it never holds privs if you grant ‘openhab’ rights to access it.

On Debian type machines such folders have a group with group rwx permissions so all one needs do is add openhab to that group to grant it rights. CentOS doesn’t work like this? That’s unfortunate. It is rather unfortunate because running OH (or any such service for that matter) as root is not a great answer from a security perspective.

@Paul_Atkin

Also, this new method you got here is not a usual ‘./configure; make, make install’ way.

This isn’t a new method. OH is a Java program. Java and make don’t usually play well together. OH’s packaging and delivery is pretty standard for Java type projects.

The OH community also suffers a little from Debian myopia. All the docs and scripts and packages are focused on apt. This makes sense because perhaps the most popular platform upon which OH is run is a Raspberry Pi, or a similar type of machine, which runs a Debian based Linux (i.e. Raspbian). With Ubuntu being the second most popular support for other types of Linux, OS X, and Windows is not as strong.

However, I would say that I’m sure the community would welcome someone to submit an RPM build to the build scripts.

@Paul_Atkin

same issue i have, then somebody goes and posts some xml document with node5 description… Where is it supposed to go? grepping whole openhab2 set of files for any of that brings nothing. Where to go, what to do - go figure.

That is a treach for OH 1.5. So much has changed that what is on that thread is unlikely to address your specific problem. Those node.xml files are automatically generated by the binding based on the data in the zwave database. Chris asked the submitter to append some to that file just to see if there was a problem with the database entry for that device. Essentially the XML tells the functional part of the binding what that node is capable of and configuration parameters. Manually editing that file is not a permanent solution.

And for the record, those files are located in userdata/zwave

@Paul_Atkin

And it is like this for every single little thing.

So OH is a lot like Linux. There is a core which you can think of like the Kernel. Then there are addons which run on the core. Pretty much all of the addons are written by third parties. So there is going to be a lot of inconsistency in the amount of documentation written, quality of that documentation, and how much fiddling is required to get things to work. These addons are like all the programs that run on Linux.

@Paul_Atkin

And it is like this for every single little thing.
You have to put all descriptions of various users and groups into text files, fine. There is a ‘demo’ setup - so it has to be
first found out it is a must to deploy it in demo, so it then cold be reversed engineered and then you can construct it similar to that. Fine, done.

So you admitted above you usually do not RTFM. So have you spent any time reading at http://docs.openhab.org/ ?

These are indeed incomplete but they do give a relatively high overview of all the pieces and concepts and how they fit together. Unfortunately, OH is not very self documenting nor is it intuitive how to set everything up. Skipping the docs is really not going to lead to a happy experience.

@Paul_Atkin

Where can it be found out how to deal with persistences? There are 5 kinds of them. What is to be used? I had tried mysql one against mariadb on centos - it was making some tables. Replaced it with mariadb proper persistence with jdbc.cfg file that has, again, be crafted manually as system does nothing to make it - it connects to DB and pings is fine but does not create anything.

Design Pattern: Group Based Persistence

Edit: Updated for OH 4 See Design Pattern: What is a Design Pattern and How Do I Use Them for an explanation of what a DP is and how to use them. Problem Statement There are several reasons why a home automation enthusiast would want to use openHAB persistence: charting, using historical Item states in rules logic, restore previous values on openHAB restart, detailed analysis, access to the data with external tools, etc. By default, a persistence add-on will implement a default strategy which…

Persistence

I can’t answer specifically to your specific problems with mariadb and mysql. I know some people have made it work but I have no experience with it. The first link above is how I set up my persistence and the second one is to the OH 1.x wiki which is a good source of info since the 2.0 persistence docs are unfinished. But for the most part, based on some things I’ve seen on this forum, MariaDB and MySQL are not compatible. You have to use the same binding as the DB.

@Paul_Atkin

HabMin i get it is still in development, so it is probably expected that perfectly fine working basic UI content is showing its tab in HabMin but with totally empty content and the only item with content is ‘Home’ that has a copy of ‘Control’ section that has nothing at all from the text files you configure?

There are several UIs in OH. I agree this is causing some confusion. PaperUI and Habmin are intended to be administration UIs. Sitemaps which get defined by .sitemap files are for configuing BasicUI and ClassicUI. HabPanel has its own browser based set and configuration. I don’t know much about CometVisu.

At this time, neither PaperUI nor Habmin are capable of creating sitemaps.

@Paul_Atkin

it is obvious to me by now that there are 2 different items systems in openhab2 - one from config files and one that is hidden inside, somewhere. At least after i turned off ‘simple mode’ in Item Linking - i gained an ability to associate items from .items text file to the ‘thing’ openhab finds by itself. Any assignments to things in the .items file are simply ignored and it was totally confusing in the beginning. I wish there was some kind of an slideshow somewhere that could actually show step by step how to do devices, as normal people who not geeks and do not have desire to reverse engineer all this will not be able to use it, no way no how. Again, it is not a whining - just a my bystander view - user experience here for me was very bad in the beginning, after getting more into it it becomes more intuitive, but manual configuration and settings is an Achilles heel here.

I completely agree. I’m firmly in the camp that PaperUI, in its current state, causes more problems than it solved. Until PaperUI or Habmin can do EVERYTHING and do it well I would make it optional, not the default thing that comes up. I’ve had to help a lot of people and have even run into problems myself because of the way PaperUI does things and hides things.

My recommendation is to use text files for everything (turning off simple mode in PaperUI) except auto-discovery of Things and installation of addons.

The inconsistency and bifurcated configuration is really causing problems.

@Paul_Atkin

Like this - why even to offer to ‘create new item’ in things link interface if all it responds back is ‘ERROR 405 - Method not allowed’? You then go to log files to see what the heck this ‘error 405’ was - there is nothing in logs. It is just plain confusing. I bet it will eventually get better but as is now - it is very confusing.

That sounds like a bug. That shouldn’t happen. But again, I don’t recommend using PaperUI for this anyway so I’m not sure if this is a known bug or something new. It is worth a new thread to discuss and perhaps opening an issue.