Goal What should I do to keep my HomeSeer system up & running? Why? One page that lists a lot of things that can make your life easier.

• HS Device Status – NEW!
• HS Connectivity
• Disk space
• DB Maintenance
• HS Device & Events
• HS Troubleshooting
• HS Naming
• HS Must haves
• HS Security
• HS Monitoring
• HS Backups

Good info: Official HomeSeer knowledge base.

Homeseer Device Status

MONITOR DEVICES – NEW!
How often do you go through all of your devices to see if there’s issues? “Communication Failure”, “Battery Low”, etc. I created this script (with documentation) that creates an overview of the devices that have a problem, based on your needs.

Download: Attach:HS_DEVICESTATUS_02.zip version 0.2

Documentation and .vb script included

Future: ability to email report and more. See docs & script.

Question: I want to (automatically) check the HomeSeer configuration DB (sample.mdb) for events that have not been running for the past 2 months. This allows you to identify events that can be removed or that have a problem. How? Don’t know ;-) Do you?

Homeseer Connectivity

• Create a Status-only device names ‘External IP address’ (example: device-code T90)
  
• Create “Monitor WAN IP” event:
  
  This sets the device-string (IP address) and the device-value (a number based on the IP address – so we can monitor this number changing)
• Create “Notify if WAN IP changed” event:In this case I write an entry in the HomeSeer log, send an email, send another email to an email-to-SMS gateway and an iPhone Push notification.
• Run both events manually to see if they work
• Make sure that if your WAN ip changes that your network is setup in a way that you can still have connections to the internet

The great thing is that if my provider decides to give me a new IP address, I’ll be the first to know!
To monitor the availability of your HomeSeer server on the network, please check the Monitoring section below.

Diskspace

• Use Windirstat to see where the diskspace on your HS2 system is used
  (click image to enlarge)
• (Re)move contents of \HS2\Updates2 folder. It is not required for daily operation. First move all contents to a temp folder before removing the files.
• Log-files: You can create a process that zips the log files every month (and optionally stores them somewhere else)

• Own DB – Compact using MS Access (at own risk)
• RFXCOM DB – Compact using MS Access (at own risk)
• Plugwise DB – Compact using MS Access (at own risk)
• HomeSeer DB – Don’t think you need compacting because it’s not that big but do you have backups?

• list ALL devices
  • Go through all of them, check the ‘last update’. Do you really need them? Before removing, search for the devicecode in Tools/Search. You might find that it is being used by some event.
• List ALL events
  • Are they being used? Could you combine or completely eliminate events?

• Set the log-file-color-keywords
  • How: Tools, Log-keywords/Color-styles.
    (click image to enlarge)
• Logfile: most recent event at the top (so you don’t have to scroll down for the latest log-results)
  • How: Setup / General / recent log entry at the bottom: NO
    
    

• Use sensible names for location1 and location2
  • How: click Setup / Website-tab / “Location 1/2 Field Label”
    
    Note: Check “Use location 2” and “Location 1 AND location 2” option so you can decide if you want to filter by room or type.
• Enter names for location1 (‘Room’) and location2 (‘Type’)

• Link Editor (via HomeSeer updater)
• All scripts on this website ;-)

• Important
  • How: you tell me (i.e. ‘under construction’)
• Virus scanner
  • Microsoft Security Essentials (free and pretty good)
• Firewall
  • If configured, check the logs to see what’s going on
• Windows Update
  • Keep your system up to date with the latest (security) patches
• HomeSeer accounts
  • Check your accounts & rights, especially for guest accounts