I am tech-savvy enough to make my own automation rules with openHAB, but I am not very familiar with linux.
I have no idea how to set up openHAB Cloud onto a machine and get it working. I even tried to follow the tutorial on the github site, and I could not get it to run.
It would be incredibly useful if somehow this could be added to a release of openHabian. I know some people don’t like the idea of opening openHAB to the internet, but if you only forward ports from the internet to the openHAB Cloud server, I don’t see what the problem would be.
It seems that the only long-term solution is to make it easier for everyone to set up a openHAB Cloud server for themselves. It needs to either be included in a version of openHabian pre-installed with nothing more than very simple configurations required, or update the installation tutorial to be much more friendly to those who have absolutely no idea whatsoever what they are doing in linux.
It seems the simplest thing would be to get someone to just add it in a stable working form, to a release of openHabian.
If you are putting it on the same machine as openHAB, why not just set up a reverse proxy and avoid the overhead of openHAB Cloud in the first place. NOTE: setting up a reverse proxy for openHAB IS included with openHABian. There is no need for openHAB Cloud at all in this configuration.
openHAB Cloud is intended to run outside your network to allow you to safely access your OH from outside your network without doing a port forward. If you are doing the port forward anyway then there is no need for the cloud server in the first place.
Furthermore, openHAB Cloud Server is not intended to be run from the same machine as OH itself and therefore does not belong as part of openHABian.
And I would argue that there already is an easy to install and run version of the Cloud Server. There is a Docker Image that will contain everything already packaged and ready to run within a Docker instance, though since it doesn’t have the letsencrypt certs yet it isn’t that useful just yet.
I would argue that if you are not very Linux savvy then you do not have the knowledge necessary to monitor the system for compromise. Anything exposed to the internet will be constantly attacked and you can only really safely expose a service to the Internet needs constant monitoring and assessment for attempted attacks and more importantly successful attacks. This requires a pretty good handle on Linux. At a minimum, I would deploy an AWS instance rather than running it on your own machine with port forwarding.
In reference to myopenhab.org, this week there have been a number of issues with myopenhab.org. Most of the issues have been dealt with I believe and at least for me it has been up and running just fine for today. Prior to this week, I can’t remember the last time there were problems with myopenhab.org. Usually, it is very stable and reliable. But, one or twice a year it encounters problems and will have a few days of intermittent outages.
I don’t think you can user your personal cloud server with Alexa. I could be wrong. I know you can’t with IFTTT. They only work with my openHAB.org.
If you thought getting just the server running is hard it is as least twice as hard to get Google Assistant to work with you personal cloud server, but at least it’s possible.
I have asked many times about that on the forums here, but nobody has responded with a definitive answer.
It would be nice if at the very least a notification server could be built in or made stand alone. Notifications can be important, and having to rely on a third party is not good.
It would be awesome if Alexa support could be implemented without the need for a server in-between.
I think that hasn’t been built yet since there already is a notification server available in myopenhab.org and there is integration with more than half a dozen third party services, both free and paid.
And the challenge is notifications are built using three entities: sender, receiver, and central server. The sender published a message to the central server and the receiver gets the message from the central server. There needs to be a central server because both the server and receiver has to be able to see something no matter where they happen to be network wise. So you need something exposed on the internet that adjudicates been the sender and receiver.
Unless you really know what you are doing, you shouldn’t be hosting such a server on you machine with port forwarding.
So we are one again back at spinning up an AWS running the openHAB Cloud Server.
You are aware that Alexa is a third party service.
Assuming it isn’t possible, the reason would be because Amazon doesn’t allow it. They only allow connections with pre-approved trusted servers. You can try to get Amazon to trust your server but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
I am not saying it would be easy, but it would be preferable to have notifications running from the same internet connection as my home automation, even if it is running on a different machine.
I was hoping nobody would be picky about my choice of wording, but for simplicity I felt it unnecessary to be so exact. I usually am very specific with my wording, and had even wrote the post without the words third-party in it, but felt it just didn’t sound natural, and decided to just use that word anyway. To now be asked this question, is exactly what I deserve, I guess.
It isn’t that it isn’t technically feasible. There is a reason though why this doesn’t exist for an system.
The problem is that the types of skills to run such a service safely would be the same skills necessary to install your own version of the Cloud Server.
If you can’t figure out how to install and get the Cloud Server running then you almost certainly do not have the skills necessary to monitor your system for compromise. You take a HUGE risk with every port forward. Having the Cloud Server installed along side openHAB and telling people to just port forward would verge on IT malpractice, if there were such a thing. The fact that the reverse proxy is in openHABian gives me have concerns already, but at least nginx is used by a much larger population than Cloud Server, has corporate backing, and a proven track record.
