Ok now that was a Giant Pain in the Vera

[James Sentman]

I have recently changed and re-arranged some of the things on my network and had difficulty as well. In my case it turned out to be because I changed devices and gave them the same IP as the previous devices, and also changed some switches around at the same time. The switches on the network got completely confused and possibly the main internet router as well. After power cycling every switch on the network things came back to life, I really think they were caching the ARP table and couldn’t send messages that were destined for an IP that it used to know about to a new device with a different MAC even tough it had the same IP as the previous device. Usually they are supposed to age their tables and re-figure things out after a certain time, but I think the fact that I put a different device on with the same IP confused that, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were other ways to confuse things as well.

So the first thing I would recommend is doing a hard power off and on again of every single device on the network even the things like switches and hubs that we consider as dumb, they are not dumb there is a huge amount of logic going on in them and they definitely can get confused!

There isn’t any way to back the Vera up to XTension, but there is a way to back it up to it’s own backup files. Every so often after adding new devices I make it a point to do a backup of it though now that I think about it it’s been a very long time and I should do it again. It’s a little confusing as there are 2 different backups and they don’t make it clear to me which is which always. You have to generate a backup of the ZWave network information separately. but it can be then backed up in the regular backup of just the Vera info. Or something like that. As a matter of fact let me go and do mine now and see if the UI to it has changed at all…

and HA it’s been so long since I’ve logged in via the web interface to it that it’s not actually sending any pages to me at all, just errors and partial loads! Even though it is still working perfectly through XTension it can’t seem to offer me up the web ui. So I’ll go down and restart it physically and see if it comes back after that…

OK, thats brought it back to life and I remember why it was so confusing. The button that says backup the zwave network on the regular backup page in settings doesn’t actually appear to do anything. You have to first go into Settings/Z-Wave Settings and then switch to the advanced tab and then select “Backup Z-Wave Network” that will make a backup internally to the Vera which it will then include when you download a full backup. Make sure that the date of last backup has updated before you download the full backup via the settings backup page.

And once you have that file you should be able to upload that to the Vera should you have to reset it completely again. I hope that won’t be necessary but it’s never a bad thing to have that backup anyway!


> On Feb 8, 2020, at 1:02 PM, Cecil Jones <6.cjones at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I think I did something wrong.  I recently updated my router and had to re-IP my network.  Everything went fine until I got to the Vera.  No matter what I did I could not get it back on the network and so I ended up having to do a complete reset.  Ugghhhh.
> 
> The final straw for me was when I had to take my ZWave garage door controller off and bring into the house and put it beside my Vera so that I could re-sync it.  Then I had to recreate my devices in XTension and add my scripts back so that my notifications were working again. :(
> 
> I want to make one more change to my network that will involve yet another IP change, but now I am hesitating after all this work.
> 
> So it got me to thinking….James, can XTension pull all the needed information from the Vera so that I do not have to re-pair them in case of failure?
> 

Thanks,
 James


James Sentman                       http://www.PlanetaryGear.org		http://MacHomeAutomation.com




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