A home automation rule engine for network monitoring. Sigh.
Correct, which is what I said in my first reply. You are trying to use OH in a way it was never intended. Tools like Zabbix are a much more appropriate tool for network monitoring. OH is for home automation.
Itās a pity. A number of other home automation systems that I have used will PING network devices and show Up/Down status. I also think that in the age of the Smart Home, many homes these days have more networked devices than an office of a few years ago. A quick check on my home network (Fing from an Android smart phone) show 48 IP devices.
So does openHAB. The gripe is about automatic scanning.
Letās be careful here.
OH also will PING network devices and show Up/Down status.
But that isnāt what you are asking for. You are asking for OH to automatically discover network devices in the background and somehow automatically integrate those devices into the home automation. This is the part that OH doesnāt support.
You cannot integrate a device automatically. There needs to be some manual interaction to give that device a context and a meaning in the home automation. Is that device a phone and therefore represent your presence? Is that device a critical server and will cause some portion of the home automation to not work because itās down? Only the human can do that part.
If you are looking for network monitoring then OH is not the correct tool for the job. Itās not a network monitoring tool. Thatās not its goal or purpose. There are plenty of other tools out there that will do a far better job. The fact that other home automation products have included this orthogonal feature doesnāt change the fact that OH doesnāt support it and IMHO it doesnāt really belong as part of a home automation tool.
And Iām not speaking as someone with one or two devices. I have 58 devices on my network, 20 of which are home automation related running 17 services. And for those that are related to the home automation, yes, I manually accepted those Things from the Inbox after manually triggering a scan of my network. Then I integrated each one into my home automation where they have a specific meaning (e.g. if InfluxDB goes down then my persistence isnāt working and OH alerts and takes remedial actions) by creating Items and adding the to Groups and adding them to my sitemap in the appropriate location.
OK youāve said it at least 3 times now I give in, you have beaten me to death over it.
Hi There,
Iām new to the community. And have been trying to figure out how to get the network binding to perform a manual scan to show items in my inbox that I can then integrate into my home automation context. Initially Iām looking for the mobile devices in my home to do presence management, but not a single device shows up when I search for network things.
Iām running a fresh install of āopenHAB 2.4.0 Release Buildā on Raspberry Pi 3B via openhabian.
The steps Iāve following to performo a manual scan are as follows
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Navigate to PaperUI
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Click on the Inbox
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Select "Search for Thingsā
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Click Network Binding
The screen shows āsearching for Things ā¦ā with a spinning circle for about 2 minutes, but nothing shows up in my inbox for me to āmanuall acceptā those things into my home automation.
I found another post that seemed to indicate that network.config file has an error in it, whereby it places a random āBā on two lines. Iāve cleaned up those 2 random Bs but still have the same behaviour.
/var/lib/openhab2/config/bindings/network.config :
allowDHCPlisten="true" allowSystemPings="true" arpPingToolPath="arping" cacheDeviceStateTimeInMS="2000" service.pid="binding.network"
Any help would be appreciated.
The scan is known to be broken in the 2.4 version of the Network binding. I think it was fixed for OH 2.5 M1. If not you will need to move to the snapshots. I believe the snapshots have stabilized in the past few weeks so it should be safe to run, at least to get started.
Scanning works in OH 2.5m1. But especially mobiles to not expose any services that the binding could find. It tries to ping devices (most mobiles to not respond to pings nowadays), it tries to find windows pcs by looking for the netbios and rpc ports, it tries to find XBoxās by the multi media port.
But the binding canāt perform any magic. If a firewall blocks all traffic and pings are disabled or the network subnet is too big or IPv6 only, those devices cannot be found.
Yeah well it is the first thing a new user comes across. A tutorial that sends them down a rabbit hole. Only to find out it isnāt supported. Frustrating.
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Currently broken is not the same as not supported. And it isnāt even currently broken and hasnāt been for some time.
But if you have any recommendations, changes, or additions to make to any of the docs, Iām certain the Issue or PR would we welcome. See How to file an Issue
Oh I got the impression that the network binding had been depricated , if so then it would be helpful to new users, taking first steps, if the tutorial didnāt take them straight to a broken or depricated tool.
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Network binding is definitely not deprecated. It is current and there are new features being added to it even in the last months.
It is also not broken in the snapshots for sure and I suspect not in OH 2.5 M1. There was a bug that escaped notice when OH 2.4 was released that prevented autodiscovery from working which was quickyl fixed once it was discovered.
Iām not sure it is a good use of time to rewrite the tutorial to deal with a momentary bug that has since been fixed. But anyone who disagrees is welcome to modify and improve the tutorial.
Just installed M1 on a Pi 4 last week. Nothing discoveredā¦
Just another newbie here that stumbles into the rabbit hole of the outdated tutorial.
Honestly, where is the problem to mention this long term issue with a small sentence in the official tutorial ?
I wanted to give OH a try but when my first experiences are beginning with a listless non up-to-date official tutorial this seems not to be a trustful start.
Hereās another vote to update the tutorial. I installed OH a couple months ago, tried the tutorial, it failed, ok another day. Now maybe itās better so I try again, tutorial fails. Hmm, something wrong with the install? OK I reimage the SD card on the Pi and reinstall everything from scratch. Still fails. I never suspected the Very First Tutorial would lead astray.
So, thanks in advance for a better onboarding experience.
BTW the install page neglects to mention the need to do systemctl start.
Same happened to meā¦I stumbled over the not working Network Binding in the tutorial. First of course I believed that some setup on my install was not correct, so I started to navigate through the community.
After spending 2 hours with it, I still do not know whether the Network Binding is broken, deprecated or in the middle of a re-write.
Whatās so difficult in writing a sentence in the tutorial e.g. āThe Network Bind is currently not usable - please skip this part of the tutorialā?
Can I do this? Updating a tutorial usually takes no more then 10 minutes, if one knows what to do.
Sorry to say - if you want to have new members in your community, then you must be a little smoother then this one hereā¦
The binding is working fine with the latest snapshot. As 2.4 stable release is very old now, I suggest to upgrade to a snapshot version.
BTW, welcome to the community.
Installed latest snapshot - now, Hue Servise does not connect to Logitech Harmony.
This whole thing is completely buggy and halfway between old, file-based, and new, web-based- but unstable and core features missing.
How am I supposed to work with this?
Okay, we need to work through one issue after the other.
Network binding is working now?
What does the HUE service have to do with the Harmony binding?
I am using HUE and Harmony (and Network binding) without any issues, not sure what you want to achieve.
If you want to connect your HUE devices to your Harmony remote (which I did too), this is not an openHAB issue, because openHAB is not involved in this.
Please be more detailed and more specific in your questions: