So I went on a little weekend trip this past weekend. It was a nice little get away but I returned to problems. Occasionally my zwave/zigbee controller/coordinator Things would go offline. I suspect it’s a problem with the hypervisor but it doesn’t happen enough to have made it worth investigation yet.
However, in planning for investigation, I’ve create a simple rule to notify me when either goes offline. Since it’s the same HUSZB-1, it’s the same device so I’d often get two messages at the same time when it does go offline. The notification is an email sent to and through my gmail account.
And here’s the problem. Almost as soon as I left the house, the controller/coordinator started to rapidly flap online and offline several times a minute. When I came home the lights were not on and when I finally looked at my logs I say that I had reached the daily limit in the number of emails gmail will allow to be sent. 
BTW, the limit seems to be around 1000.
So, the lessons learned are:
- even for temporary rules, put a limit on the number of resources it can use
- don’t forget about these temporary rules and maybe disable them when you go on a trip.
For the curious, here’s the rule since adding the rate limiting and a debounce:
triggers:
- id: "1"
configuration:
thingUID: zwave:serial_zstick:zw_controller
status: OFFLINE
type: core.ThingStatusChangeTrigger
- id: "2"
configuration:
thingUID: zigbee:coordinator_ember:zg_coordinator
status: OFFLINE
type: core.ThingStatusChangeTrigger
conditions: []
actions:
- inputs: {}
id: "3"
configuration:
type: application/javascript
script: >
var OPENHAB_CONF = java.lang.System.getenv("OPENHAB_CONF");
load(OPENHAB_CONF+'/automation/lib/javascript/personal/alerting.js');
load(OPENHAB_CONF+'/automation/lib/javascript/community/rateLimit.js');
load(OPENHAB_CONF+'/automation/lib/javascript/community/timerMgr.js');
this.tm = (this.tm === undefined) ? new TimerMgr() : this.tm;
this.rl = (this.rl === undefined) ? new RateLimit() : this.rl;
var sendAlertGen = function(rl) {
return function() { rl.run(function(){ sendAlert("The Zwave Controller or Zigbee Coordinator is OFFLINE!"); }, "24h"); }
};
this.tm.check("zigbee", "1m", sendAlertGen(this.rl), true);
type: script.ScriptAction
timerMgr.js and rateLimit.js can be found at https://github.com/rkoshak/openhab-rules-tools. Prior to this the rule had just the import and the one line call to sendAlert. An email was sent every time the rule triggered.