Homeseer downtime status alerts

[DevinH]

I was curious what people were doing to monitor when homeseer goes down. In my experience, it never goes down unless I'm the one who takes it down.

However, I just got homeseer phone setup and working with a way2call device a couple days ago. This morning I was on a work conference call and was fiddling with hs3 settings at the same time (it was a boring conference call) and I went to restart HS3 and realized that it also caused my phone to disconnect from the call. Assuming this is normal behavior, I figure it'd be a good idea to get some kind of alert if homeseer does go down, just so we're not in a position where we can't get any phone calls for half the day until I realize why.

My thoughts were to implement some sort ping on the local network every 10 minutes or so, or maybe a GET request on one of the HS3 admin pages, and then send an email or notification to my phone or something. But I wanted to see what others were doing and how they were going about it.

[mikedr]

We have two homes over which we split our time during the year. In each I have a HomeTroller SEL-PRO. I was sufficiently concerned about having to reboot it remotely that I got one of these for each place:

http://3gstore.com/product/4186_sing...er_switch.html

However, I've never had to use it. The only time I've ever had any issues with HS3 having to be rebooted is if I'm messing with something and I confuse the system somehow (which is very rare). When we're not at a particular house, I don't do any maintenance at that house -- i.e., no software updates and whathaveyou, just to be on the safe side.

At our Arizona house we never lose power. We do lose power in Washington. The HS3 is on a UPS that can give power to the system for about an hour, but it's not unheard of here to have power outages lasting a day or two (which is quite sad -- we're in a suburb of Seattle).

My only big fear is that once on each system when I cut power myself, somehow the system got into a strange situation where I had to hook up an HDMI monitor and a USB keyboard, simply to press enter when it asked what it should be booting into (HS3 or default or something like that). It's never occurred during a power outage, but only when I'm cutting power to the device manually.

[lveatch]

I installed nagios (https://www.nagios.org/projects/nagios-core/) on one of my other home servers which tests the main HS url for availability.