Where do you define users in OH3?

Do you have a lot of ‘stuff’ on it? Scenes, plugins etc? I completely stripped mine bare - effectively factory reset it - so that now it is just the relay between openHAB and my Z-Wave devices.

No exaggeration: it has been rock solid since 2014, survived a number of house moves and power outages, and just continues to quietly blink happily in the corner.

So I’m the complete opposite to you: I wouldn’t move to OH3 until I found a way to integrate my Vera, as it’s been so reliable! Not helpful, I know - sounds like you’re having terrible luck!

Is that do-able via the UI, or only via config files? My plan was to use the UI for things & items, and config files for rules. There was a reason for that decision, but off the top of my head I can’t remember what it was.

No. Like you mine is almost devoid of everything except its zwave network info and the oh interface. It’s always been really sluggish since day 1; back when I would ssh into it and tail log files, it’d often have ten, fifteen seconds between updates and/or just randomly kill the ssh session with no rhyme nor reason. It’s a vera edge, and I suspect it’s just dramatically under-spec’d for the job it’s being asked to do.

The reason for the reboots is that without it, if OH sends it a command there’s a 25% chance it’ll get ignored completely. There’s another 25% chance that it’ll take forever (30s) to execute. The rest of the 50% is instantaneous execution, so I know the hardware is capable of doing it, it just… isn’t. (Suspect it’s because of memory leaks / garbage collection happening and just being unlucky with timing. Not worth the time/effort to find out.) But if I reboot it every day, it never ignores commands and only about a 10% chance of delayed execution but even then it’s down to a live-able-but-could-definitely-be-better 10 second delay.

On OH 1 you know the answer, there is no admin UI. You’ll have to configure the MQTT binding to enable the event bus in openhab.cfg. Everything in OH 3 except for defining persistence strategies (i.e. .persist files) and a few other things (creating new users, populating the Exec binding’s whitelist, custom Ephemeris configs, etc.) is doable through the UI.

So you have your choice of how to define things. Everything but rules done through the UI is definitely possible. Personally, I’m even putting my rules in the UI. I like the when/but only if/then structure of the rules. It makes it easy to define when certain rules are allowed to run separately from what the rule does when it runs. I like the break between those but that structure is not possible in text based rules. You have to implement the conditional as if/switch statements at the top of the rule.

You misunderstood my question. Can you change a thing’s core definition from the UI? Can you change it from being a mqtt thing to a zwave thing?

This is impossible and does not make sense imho.

No but why would you? Just create a new Thing and update the links to the Items. Things are inextricably bound to the binding. You can’t take a Thing from one binding and turn it into a Thing for a different type of binding.

You can’t do that through .things files either.

1 Like

If all the names are going to change when going from mqtt to zwave then I don’t understand why you’d do it in the first place. I guess you could do a global search and replace, but… Ugh.

The Links will change. The Things will change. The Items will not change and Items is what OH uses everywhere else. Your UIs wouldn’t change. Your Item configs wouldn’t change. Your Rules wouldn’t change. Your Persistence wouldn’t change.

All the real work in OH is done with the Items. And with this approach the Items remain unchanged. All that changes is the link. When you change the link, the same Item will go from MQTT to Zwave and everything else remains unchanged.

And yes, this is a little more work to set up. Eventually you’ll need to change the links on the Items. But you are doing this to gain the ability to work on the OH 3 config while leaving OH 1 up and running. You can create all your Zwave Items, Rules, sitemap, pages, persistence and all the rest in OH 3 now and verify it’s working the way you want without having to deal with the problem with the Zwave binding until Chris can get back to you and without needing to wait for a time when it’s OH to bring OH 1 offline.

Only being able to work on the OH 3 config at night when the family is asleep. Ugh. Not being able to make any progress at all on the config because of a problem with a binding. Ugh.

I’ve opened a github issue since this looks like an internal zwave binding bug. Debug logs, and even a zwave radio sniff while it was going on are available there. (Yes, I have a zniffer & know how to use it. Yes, it’s useful. No, it’s not as useful as often as you’d think.)

As for mqtt, I see what you’re proposing, and if I had to be off of oh1 with a fixed date I’d be following your plan. Thanks!

I cannot create a user here:
Whenever I put in something and press create, the mainUI erases everything and says:
please try again (on 3.0.1)