Hi, I recently came across this effort - certainly looks interesting… Before jumping into the various details and posted info, of which thankfully there is quite a bit, I have a question which has been an issue for a while with a project which I’m working on.
Is there a way for me to access openHAB servers (say Raspberry-PIs - RPIs) once they are installed in the wild at family/friends’ homes ? The issue here is that most of these RPIs will be behind NAT’ing firewall - meaning I don’t have their IP addresses nor do I want to tell these family/friends to go muck with their routers to open/forward certain ports. I’ve looked for Hamachi-like alternatives but wasn’t able to find any viable free/open source solutions.
The closest I came was weaved (weaved.com) but its a paid/fee service which I want to avoid (plus I’d like to control things myself in lieu of injecting a middleman in the midst of all of this and be under their mercy).
I would assume that if this doesn’t exist yet within this framework it will need to be added urgently as an option as more and more people will deploy IoT solutions and will want access to those IoT devices from behind their home/office routers.
In short, I’m looking for a resource-light ability to access my RPIs from behind a firewall using a free/open source solution (weaved seems interesting but its a paid service, VPN is too resource hungry, reverse SSH requires a constant connection); ideally a manner by which a remote node (RPI) could simply register its existence in order to be able to reach it somehow on-demand. Think about the case where one has say 5,000 devices he/she would want to remotely access or manage sporadically (ie. not all at once) - how could that be done elegantly ?
I didn’t see mention of my.openhab.org in your question, so it needs to be said that that free service does this very well, plus adds support for integration into IFTTT, mobile notifications, and some other good features.
Thanks for your reply - having just looked at my.openhub.org I didn’t see any spelled out restrictions beyond the fact that it’s in beta. I’ve seen this before - its fully available in beta then it becomes a for fee service and/or reduced access (ie. access 5 devices for free and you’ll have to pay for more than that). If, again, I want a solution that will cater to 5,000 or more devices is there assurance that this service will be available free of charge ? I realize that the intentions are good (nay, wonderful) but it would be ideal to be able to replicate this service on one’s own server - is that possible ? Are there limitations, if deployed, to how many “connections” are possible ? Are there any roadblocks in making this happen ?
What other “deploy your own” options/solutions are there ?
If you are trying to view OpenHab itself for your “friends and family”, myOpenHab will work fine.
If you are working on the servers for maintenance purposes or doing maintenance on OpenHab, myOpenHab will not help. You’ll still need access to console and/or remote Xgui. (ssh and vnc). Which means you need an open path to the box. Means either their NAT has to open a port for you, or perhaps you could have some code on the remote which does a reverse-proxy (or similar) through an open port on your router.
Yeah, I was wondering if openHAB can help in the “some code” area as a means to reach these remote servers especially when those servers can be accessed via the cloud myOpenHAB service - it seem like a reasonable “optional” next step extension.
Any other plausible methods to make this access possible ?
