Do you turn your touchscreens off?

[HomersBrain]

I've just installed a touchscreen PC in the kitchen so we can listen to mp3s and control HS. (It's an ex EPOS pentium - Similar one here http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.d...734319040&rd=1) We spend most of our time in the lounge, so it doesn't need to be on all the time. Also, when you get up close you can hear white noise coming from the speakers.

My question is, if you've got touchscreen PCs, do you keep them running all the time, only when the house is occupied etc etc. I was thinking about using an appliance module to only turn it on when the house is occupied.

What do you all think?

[Rupp]

HB,
I posted a vb exe recently, and there have been others, that will turn off the monitor via an event in HS.

http://board.homeseer.com/showthread...t=turn+monitor

[HomersBrain]

Cheers Rupp. As my HS pc is different to the touchscreen pc, I'm guessing that would turn the HS monitor off if I run it via an event. Am I wrong?

I've just looked at the Message Server plug in documentation, and there's the MESSAGEEXELINK function. (This may be the wrong forum but...) I take it I can use this to run your exe?

I saw something recently on the forum that turns the sound down to 0 so I'll have a look for that and try and fix the white noise too

Cheers

Mike

[johnwpb]

Remote monitor control

I am usung a similar program to Rupp's called Monitor Control. It is a small .exe that will send commands to either turn on/off the screen (Actually it puts the screen in power standby mode), as well as turn the screen saver on/off.

With the message server plugin, the following line will turn on the screen for my network computer "Fujitsu1"

 hs.Plugin("Message Server").MessageExeLink "c:\shared\MonitorCtrl.exe", "/p_on","","fujitsu1"

I have the small monotorctrl.exe installed on all the computers. I can then turn on/off all the monitors in the house via HS. It works great with the Message server plugin. If I, or HomeSeer send a message to any computer in the house, such as caller ID information, I also send the Monotor On command so that it can be seen if the monitor was in standby.

I also use this as part of my good night macro, & leaving macro to ensure all monitors have been turned off. This is essential for LCD monitors, as the bulb life is only rated for so many hours of use.

[bruce l]

John: Another way would be to put the exe on a shared directory on the HS server and then you would not have to install it on each PC. Altho I know thats not really needed as the exe is small and it's not a big install. However it would allow sending the same command to all PCs with a client to run the same program.

[johnwpb]

Bruce, I originally was going to go that route. But when I send a message to all 8 computers (Such as caller ID) the network traffic of that file being pulled 8 different ways can cause a few second delay.

I just put the exe on each machine, as you said it is small(Only 20k) And there is no install for it, just copy the .exe to the client computer and it is ready to go.

[jeff_lawes]

I do turn the Touchscreen PC off when I'm not home.

I already have events to set the house to "away mode" and "Active Mode" for when I come home. I just add to these events "Wake on Lan" and Shutdown commands

I also shut it off at bedtime (another event) as it isnt going to be used at night.

[HomersBrain]

Cheers for all the info guys. I'm going to have a play and see what I can come up with.

[dwoolridge]

How the heck?

Hi all,

I was just reading through this thread, (and others like it) and have a question.

How are you able to get Homeseer to execute these "monitor control" programs on a remote computer? Is the Message Server plug-in the only option? Are there any ways to do it without having to buy a plugin or other software. Anyone know if Xap or something else can do it?

I'd really appreciate any ideas or suggestions.

Win2k on all computers...

Thanks,
Doug

[dwoolridge]

Answering my own question...

Ok, I found a way...

Using "Poweroff " described in this thread, you can execute programs on a remote computer.

I use it to control Wizmo.

Brief Instructions
---------------------
1) Copy "poweroff.exe" to C:\WinNT\System32 directory on both the Server and Client computer

2) Set up Poweroff to run as a service on the Client computer
--Allow remote control on the Client computer
--Set the password
--Set the Action to "No Action"
--Save the settings

3) Copy Wizmo to C:\WinNT\System32 on the Client computer

To turn the monitor off on the Kitchen computer using Poweroff from Homeseer:

&hs.launch "poweroff", "monitor_off -remote Kitchen -password password"

Controlling Wizmo on the Kitchen computer from Homeseer:

&hs.launch "poweroff", "no_action -quiet -remote Kitchen -password password -run -program ""wizmo blank"""

Note: The password must match the password set up in (2)

Hope this is helpful,
Doug

[Michael McSharry]

The control of applications on remote computers has come up in many threads for various reasons. There are some techniques and kludges that work in various cases. Over the past few years Microsoft has tightened the screws to reduce the number of potential security holes.

I know of only 1 solution left as of about 6 months ago where any arbitrary program can be launched on a remote LAN computer. This is with psexec from sysinternals and it is free. The MS security patches have degraded its opertion to work well with only non-interactive applications. i.e. you cannot open a window and interact with it on a remote computer.

The general solution today is with a client-server architecure where each computer that is to be controlled remotely will run a server or client app waiting for a IP message from its companion on the controlling computer. There are some special purpose instances of these such as Justin's hsCommander or Christian's Message Server. Zoomkat has shown a class of solutions using a browser/http. I've used this approach in mcsMusic as well.

The general solution is with a protocol that is designed for distributed computing. When done this way it is totally transparent to being run on the local computer or on the remote computer. xap is the one for which homeseer integration has been done. With xap I'm able to start, monitor the applications ram and cpu use, and stop any application on any computer on the LAN. I have this control from any computer as well as from any browser in the world which is given access privlidge.

[turner228]

Doug

After seeing Rupps post for his monitor control prgram written in VB, I created the same thing as a xAP aplication using the xapax.ocx.

The trick Rupp was using was an API call. which was relatively straight forward to implement. so now I have a device in homeseer for a couple of touch screens which allows me to use any homeseer function to turn the screens on or off.

It would not be difficult to create xAP apps to reboot, or shutdown a touchscreen, mute the speakers, or almost any function that can be programmed into such an app. Starting a touchsreen would be difficult though!. Some of these things are on my personal hit list and I would hope to achieve some of them over the christmas and new year holidays. I won't mind though if anyone else wants to jump in and make an attempt to do these things (as long as they tell me so I don't duplicate their effort)

xAP Apps are free and supported by its community. Creators of xAP apps are encouraged to share their work.

Kevin

[dale3h]

I've considered writing a HomeSeer Plug-in that would be free and would just allow you to execute a program on a remote computer, but a lot of people would have too much to say about the security issues with it, so I haven't started yet. If anyone wants me to, please let me know how I can avoid security issues, and I will try my best. Thanks.

[smoothtlk]

I use MainLobby MLServer to execute commands on different PCs. You designate which PC to send the command in the syntax of the action.

[johnwpb]

Synthesize: I don't think that anoone on the board reading this would be concerned about you writing a plugin do do this, in fact many of us would love to see it!

The problem stems with Microsoft, and within the OS, of being able to do this. This was easily possible with previous versions of the windows, and something that MS has since removed from newer versions of the OS.

This has left al lot of people not being able to do something that we have been able to do in the past, and would like to be able to have control over. MS has had so many breaches in security, and vulnurabailty, that they have turned off many of the features that we often use in an attempt to make the OS seem more secure. When in actuality, it is not these obvious features of the OS that are being exploited, but the ones that are less obvious that have been discovered.

There are so may problems with Active X, and other protocols, open ports, and array of vulnerabilitues in the OS, that open the computer up to hacking, that MS is turning off as much as it can to make the OS more "secure".

Before SP2 I was able to pass a username and password in a URL to automatically login into a website. This has since been removed, and is no longer possible after upgrading to SP2. Plain and simple: using a valid username and password, is no longer good enough to login into a server. But, with the 100's of vulnerabilities, and a bit of hacking you can work your way into the back door.

It is a simple matter of being able to allow/disallow these features to be used on your network. Anyone with a properly configured firewall could easily keep these "loopholes" from being a problem.