Managing Homeseer in a Remote Home?

[chewie]

I have an HS instance in 2 separate homes. One is my main residence and I have HS3Pro running on Windows and registered with MyHS. In another home I have HS3PI running on a Raspberry Pi that is currently NOT registered in MyHS (I am just using the Free version).

I am looking to use that Pi instance as a way to simulate occupancy and monitor the place when no one is there.

Does anyone else do something like this and if so, how are you managing that remotely?

[Michael McSharry]

I have one instance of HS running with hardware at the remote house that is interfaced by IP. I do have a RPi at the remote house that runs zigbee2mqtt so I can get access to the zigbee water leak and motion sensors. I typically use WiFi plugs via MQTT and other WiFi devices such as water use counters that also do MQTT. I did have some older serial devices (e.g. Temp05 1-wire) that I interfaced with a IP/Serial bridge. Now, however, everything is direct IP.

It is really much easier to manage one install of HS than doing multiple because of maintenance in general. I did describe in another thread where mcsMQTT was used to provide the syncing of data between two HS instances. https://forums.homeseer.com/forum/ho...-2-hs3-systems

[Bigstevep]

You every try VNC? You can install it on the PI and log into it from wherever you want. VNC allows up to five connections (in a team) that run the VNC server at no charge. You can put the VNC viewer on whatever devices you want (computer, laptop, iPad, etc.) as many as you want and control it. I have a couple of remote systems I manage and just connect to them through VNC.

[chewie]

Thanks for the feedback guys, much appreciated. I had not thought of VNC as a way of managing the Pi remotely, which seems stupid in hindsight considering how many Linux boxes I have managed with it in the past. Der...

In terms of just extending my single instance as Michael suggested, I have considered that and honestly had just gone this way because I had a Pi and using the free HS-Pi license seemed like a decent cheap way to go. I will read through your thread.

Thanks for the feedback guys!

[randman]

If you want a server that you can have full, 100% control remotely, and willing to spend the $$, get a server that supports iPMI, such as HPE servers that have iLO. Servers that support IPMI (what HPE calls iLO) can be controlled remotely so even if the main operating system goes down or is unreachable, the server can always be rebooted remotely. IPMI can also be used for installing software remotely. VNC is nice and inexpensive, and I used it for years before I got servers with IPMI, but VNC doesn't give 100% full remote accessibility if something were to go wrong with the host operating system. I use an old HP Microserver running VMWare ESXi hosting a HomeSeer VM. I haven't physically touched my server in years since it's so easy to control it via the network. If cost is not an issue, this is a nice server: https://www.servethehome.com/hpe-pro...this-is-super/ . But, it is more expensive than just putting VNC on a server, which is good enough most of the time.

[drhtmal]

...using the free HS-Pi license seemed like a decent cheap way to go...

What free license are you referring to?

[chewie]

What free license are you referring to?

There was a time that HS ran a promotion giving away the Raspberry Pi version of HS3. I grabbed a license at that time since the setup I want to put together for this remote home really just has a couple of motion sensors, a few water sensors and 6 or so switches/dimmers. Since it was not a large implementation I thought this would work perfectly.

[Pete]

Lately (well years now) here have been using VPN to access home and family networks.

You can today purchase a Qotom or other Micro PC with two NICs.

1 - Install Linux Ubuntu on the box for Homeseer
2 - install a PFSense Virtual box

Note here built a PFSense box using a Ditto 2 port mini server. It is a bit larger than an RPi. That said it would be an all in one solution with VPN on it.