The best part of my home automation system is that I mostly can ignore it unless there’s something I really want to add to it. Of course, its software so its not entirely maintenance free. I’ve done a few things in 2025 from taking care of some server related issues & reliability issues, security updates, and the fun part…adding some additional automation I’ve had on the back burner for a while.
Server Stability and Reliability
I’ve been running openHAB as my automation software for the last 2 1/2 years and I’ve been very happy with it overall. It has been incredibly stable and performant running on fairly lightweight hardware. Right now I’m on openHAB 4.3.1 running on Fedora Server 41. OpenHAB has been rock solid but I discovered a couple weeks ago that every couple of days, I was losing my connection to the box. I knew that it was still running because automated rules were still triggering over Z-Wave but I couldn’t connect to the box.
So the first thing I had to do was figure out my networking issue. Which I did! I had to make some changes to my Fedora networking configuration but I got that back up and running pretty easily. It had been dropping after 24 to 36 hours but now its been up for almost 2 weeks problem free.
As long as I was working on reliability issues, one of the things that has always bugged me is that when I restarted the server for any reason (usually kernel updates), there was a single Item status in openHAB that wasn’t persisted through the restarted. It was simply the alarm status (armed/disarmed) and it would be updated again the next time the alarm changed status. Usually this was fine but since I have the server apply updates automatically, there were some situations where I was out of town and that meant that the alarm status was not updated for days after a restart. Since there are rules that depend on that status, it was less than ideal.
It turned out I just needed to enable an additional persistence back end in openHAB to handle text values. I’m sure I’ll find other stability issues / bugs that need to be taken care of but honestly I have to do stuff like this like once or twice a year at most. I’m extremely happy with the stability of this system.
Security Updates
This is somewhat related to the above since this isn’t related to actual automation but just infrastructure. Its a little bit of a different topic though. I made my openHAB server available via a reverse proxy after I set it up initially. I had to do this because I’m behind a CG-NAT which blocks inbound traffic. The side effect of this is that my home network is very hard to reach externally (a good thing). OpenHAB itself uses BASIC auth to log into the GUI which I don’t find very secure. Additionally, because it has no RBAC capabilities, if you log in, you basically have access to everything.
This was bad enough but I decided that it wasn’t a big enough deal to matter. There was very little someone could do except mess around with my lights (and I guess mess up my install). There are some plugins that I use though that exposed things to the internet that I really didn’t want exposed and they couldn’t even be put behind the login.
I decided that it was time to fix this problem and looked into what my options were. I use ngrok for my tunnel and I’ve been way under-utilizing its capabilities. There was a quite simple YAML configuration to setup OAuth tokens via Google to access the domain, which I locked down to my account. This provides enough security for me to feel safe using any plugins I want on the server.
Automation Updates
Finally! The fun part. I keep a backlog of things I’d like to update or add to my system and I’ve added several of them over the past few weeks. The first one was small but nice: my stove’s hood is connected via WiFi and I’ve always found it annoying to have to turn on the lights there separately from the work lights under the cabinets on that side of the kitchen when I’m cooking.
The switch for the worklights is a Zooz Zen76 switch so it was easy to enable scenes on the switch. In openHAB I just needed to look for a double-tap up to turn on both sets of lights and then a double-tap down to turn them both off.
With that added, I decided I wanted add an automation that has been a big ticket item for me since I set up the system and never got around to. I have a pair of Honeywell WiFi Smart thermostats which I really like but, unfortunately, do not have an integration into openHAB. I believe it would be possible to write one but that’s just more work than I want to do. Fortunately, IFTTT DOES connect into these types of thermostats.
The automation I wanted to add was to set my Thermostats to a vacation mode whenever I went on vacation and then, when I return, set it back its normal schedule. Melanie and I often travel separately (we both have frequent work trips) so I discarded the idea of using my TripIt calendar to set the thermostats away. There was an easier way though. Whenever I set my alarm to Away, the thermostats could be set to vacation mode. This had the advantage of always turning them to a power saving mode whenever no one was home and not just when we were traveling.
Now, I had to set the thermostat back to their normal schedule. One way to do that is to set it when the alarm is disarmed. This works great and is useful for normal day-to-day changes when leaving and coming home. For longer trips though, I thought it would be nice for the thermostat to change before anyone got home. In this case, I decided I could use my TripIt calendar. The scenario of one person traveling and coming home, causing the thermostat to reset if the other person had left the house, is an edge case that I can deal with later if I want to.
This all ended up being fairly easy to implement. IFTTT has the ability to essentially create a RESTful web service which I set up so that openHAB could call them to trigger the thermostat settings. openHAB itself runs all of the other rules of checking alarm status or calendar events to know when to trigger them. While I’d prefer to pull this functionality directly into openHAB one day, this works really well already.
One day I’ll make a post with all of my automations because while I don’t have a ton, I really try and focus on stuff that will make life a little better while also being as unobtrusive as possible.