Jon00 Event Viewer & Documenter for HS3

[jon00]

14a1 determines that it is erroring on an event group name. The event group name is substituted with ???? which you should be able to search for to determine more clues.

[simonmason]

Great, downloaded and ran it. The server is still in the problematic state. Now the Event viewer page does load (and all of the dropdown appear to have populated correctly) and it writes this to the log:

Error in Main Block 14a1: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. at scriptcode74.VBWrapper.Main(Object MyData)

That doesn't seem to provide any more light on the subject? Perhaps this is more meaningful to you but seems very similar to the error that I got before on the screen? Thanks.

[jon00]

I had actually added the extra debug code etc so you can download V1.0.11.1 now. There are no other changes. This is for the HS3 version only.

[simonmason]

jon00 My line of investigation into logging did not work out. I had assumed that the server was getting backed up and causing the issue. But after checking the logs I don't see anything unusual happening other than this.

So I am back at square one again. It would be great if you could create a version that outputs more information about the error. It appears to be a state that the server gets into that is resolved by restarting the server. Sorry for asking for this, it is purely by coincidence that the event viewer gave me a line of investigation but this could be hugely helpful. Thanks.

[simonmason]

Thinking out loud - the restart may not be "fixing" the issue, just flushing everything out. For example, if you had a situation where a script or an event was stuck in a loop, and the system starts throwing errors, then this might eventually resolve itself or restarting the system would clean everything out. This is sort of the situation I see where the JSON commands start to work again (sometimes) after a while.

So this got me thinking, and I decided to start increasing the log level - starting with events. Immediately I saw the "dropping event callbacks error". So I investigated further and narrowed it down to two plugins. I have disabled them for now.

Is it possible that the system was getting backed up and therefore other things were failing? I will monitor it for a while to see if this is the case.

It was very kind of you to suggest an enhanced error level for your event viewer. I may still take you on that offer but let me see how this goes for now. Thanks.

Also, interestingly, the "dropping event callbacks error" only shows when debug level 2 is set. I swear that error message used to show up in the normal log?

[jon00]

You have seen the error as displayed in the log. That is an error from reading the database. The fact that it goes away when restarted is puzzling.

I can increase the error trapping to determine whether it is the name, group or enabled/disabled causing the issue and perhaps substitute the values with ??? which you can then use to locate the event.

[simonmason]

jon00 Thanks for the update. This is very insightful. Since I have been getting nowhere with HS support to diagnose this particular issue, care to hazard a guess at what is going wrong here? Does the Event Viewer have any sort of log output that could point to where the problem is happening? Thanks.

[jon00]

As far as I can tell, the error has nothing to do with JSON. The code that produced the error is Iterating through all the Homeseer events on your system to get its name, group and to see if it is enabled. It's obviously come against something it does not like and bummed out. I can only assume that JSON fails because of the same issue internally.

[simonmason]

jon00 I know that someone has posted before that they received the following error after having successfully run this script for some time:

Error in Main Block 14a: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. at scriptcode67.VBWrapper.Main(Object MyData)

I just ran into this and I think I can shed some light on this. My HS3 server recently (I think) started failing to respond to JSON requests. It seems to happen after a while, sometimes it clears up on it's own, sometimes I have to restart HS3 (or I am too impatient to wait). My server was in this state this morning and I ran the Event Viewer script and got this error. So I restarted homeseer, JSON requests are working again, and so does the Event Viewer.

I have no idea why my HS3 system suddenly stops accepting JSON requests and I am in touch with support about that - not having much luck there at present, and have started another thread on this topic in the hopes to get to the bottom of this issue. But hopefully this post will be helpful to anyone who runs into that error.

[jon00]

No, that would not work.

[devanb]

The user can create a text file which would contain a user and password combination (admittedly not very secure) that only the HS4 user could access.

Your script could then parse and apply that information to access the HS4 properties.

Just a thought.

-Devan

[jon00]

I don't really understand the question? What does this file do?

[devanb]

Yes, tried many times to address this but the method I use just does not allow it.

Since my HS4 hub sits in the middle of IOT devices, I hesitate on disabling the need for local logon. I do so only for your excellent products but I too would like a way to store logon credentials in a file that only the HS4 user can access.

Would that be a possible solution?

Thanks,

Devan

[jon00]

Yes, tried many times to address this but the method I use just does not allow it.

[mlevin77]

"No Password Required for Local/Same Network Login" needing to be checked - is that always going to be a requirement, or might a future version of your Event Viewer & Documenter work even if the web interface requires login authentication?