After 465 days, or one leap year and 99 days, the home automation server rebooted!
Not
that it wasn't going strong, just the painter/handyman that came around
to fix some things disconnected the power, causing the reboot!
I still find it impressive that it ran so long with no issues.
However, upon the reboot a few problems came to light, mainly due to my lack of knowledge and of proper planning.
The
little executables that I have written to listen to the arduino that
reads the meters, and the JeeLink that a talks to the boiler did not get
started upon rebooting of the server, which is not ideal, considering
the winter is here to stay. To make matters worse, this happened on a
Tuesday, and on Wednesday I was traveling to Berlin for work. If he did it
again during my absence, it would not be nice for the rest of the
family.
So first, when I got home, I restarted the whole
stuff, so that the house would come back to a decent temperature. This
already revealed a little bit of the problem, which is that a certain
device not always gets the same device driver in Linux. So that was the
first problem to tackle, quickly solved with some rules in udev to
create an aptly named file under /dev based on the serial number of the
device. Only possibility, since both the arduino and the JeeLink both
share the same identification information.
Next was to start
these executables automatically. I had tried before to put them in
init.d, but that had not worked. So, after many reboots to try different
configurations, I finally found out that, since my programs are not
properly written to be daemons, they never return, and then init.d does
not launch them.
The solution came with
'startproc' which launches any executable as a daemon! Put that in the
corresponding init.d configuration file and off it goes!
Another reboot to check that all is well, and time to bed!
Did not receive any complaints while in Berlin, so all was good!
I
really should use better technologies to get these things going, but I
always find that once it is working, it is difficult to motivate myself
to improve it! I always move quickly onwards to the next problem...
As
a further note, this server, a mini-itx board, has been running the
house for 5 years now! I ordered a raspberry-pi to replace it, just due
to the power consumption. I now have around 25W, and I hope the Pi will
do with at most 10W!
