Re: X10 IR interface

["Paul Gordon" <paul_gordon@xxxxxxx>]

Hi Mark,

All encouraging points by the sound of it... I suppose I really should have
emphasised that I was talking about my own personal experience...

At the moment, I have a reasonably stable HA PC, but I still wouldn't trust
my life to it.. It is "dedicated" in as much as it is purely a HA
pc, and
not used for any other purposes in the house. It is based on new, modern
components and so on... Noise isn't too much of an issue for me, neither is
the size, as it's out of the way in a rack down in the cellar. I do still
rather feel however that a PC must be at least a bit more inherently
"unreliable" due to factors like the prevalence of so many moving
parts, -
hard disks, case fans, CPU fans, PSU fans, chipset fans, et al... many of
us
know from bitter experience that these highly mechanical items can, and do,
fail periodically, often with little or no warning, and often with
catstrophic results. - Although, as you say, (and as I said in my original
post) nearly all of those failures can be mitigated by designing a
completely solid-state PC like the mini-ITX stuff)...

Isn't there a problem using CF in place of a HDD though? - I thought these
things only had a write-cycle life expectancy of a couple of million or so
writes.... - running Windows with a swapfile on that would pretty soon
reach
that limit I'd guess?... plus the cost of providing a large enough CF card
to fit an OS on might be quite high?...  (I don't know linux much, so my
experience is only of Windows OS's)... I'd have thought that maybe a LAN
boot might be a better option, coupled with a large RAM disk into which an
OS image could be loaded so everything ran entirely in cheap RAM memory
rather than flash...

I've also got a problem with my "dedicated" controller just now
as well...
my Ocelot is going a bit mental with X10... if it's connected to the X10
interface, it seems to be constantly flooding the powerline with spurious
X10 signals, which both cause mayhem around the house as things randomly
switch on & off, and also saturate the powerline to a point that X10
commands from other sources are extremely unreliable. I've changed the X10
interface to no avail, so now I have to troubleshoot the controller
itself...

I couldn't agree more about the problems mostly being caused by
"tinkering",
however, It's extremely difficult (for me at least!) to resist, as the
"because I can" motiviation is extremely strong... Think about
it, - there's
constant OS updates (XP Pro in my case), There are quite frequent updates
to
my chosen HA software (Homeseer, ACE), plus there's then the temptation to
put on all the extra bits, again "because you can", which leads
to
installing lots of ancillary bells & whistles HA software (still within
the
realms of being a "dedicated" HA PC though), so in my case I have
Outlook
2003, AT&T Natural Voices, Comfigurator, 3rd party Homeseer plugins,
serial
port drivers, Winamp, Girder, Ocelot software.. to name but a few... Each
and every additional software install is a potential source of instability,
but each provides an "essential" part of the functionality, so it
becomes a
trade-off between features and risk... This dilemma simply doesn't arise
with the hardware HA controller, as, apart from the occasional firmware
update from the manufacturer, there simply isn't any question of installing
extra software on it...

Obviously the device is programmable, and therefore it can still be
rendered
bu**ered by poor end-user programming, which I hope is the case with my X10
problem, and is quite likely the source of your Homevision problems by the
sound of it....

BTW, I just built my first mini-ITX system the other day, and I have to say
I'm quite impressed! - I too now have a nice small, quiet PC on the kitchen
table (even SWMBO approves!)

As ever, all IMHO...

Paul G.



>From: "Mark Harrison (test)" <mph@ascentium.co.uk>
>Reply-To: ukha_d@yahoogroups.com
>To: <ukha_d@yahoogroups.com>
>Subject: Re: [ukha_d] X10 IR interface
>Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2004 14:49:08 -0000
>
>Until the last few months, I'd have gone along with everything you say.
>
>In my experience, the PC stability / reliability issue is about
"dedicated
>PC" vs. "adding HA to the PC you use for other stuff"...
It's NOT about
>Windows vs. Linux (I've had stable and unstable installations of each.)
>
>My personal record for "longest uptime of a dedicated PC" is
somewhat over
>a
>year. The thing, IMHO that stuffs PC reliability is constantly adding
>software / making configuration changes.
>
>Now, the same applies to my Homevision. When I had a single script
>installed, it had an uptime running into many months. Now I'd changing
the
>configuration a fair bit, it's proved, well, flakey. For the last week,
>it's
>sitting there flashing one of its lights, and not responding to
input-port
>signals... no idea why.
>
>That's my view on "unreliable, unstable".
>
>As for "noisy, power-hungry, and large" - they are fair
criticisms of the
>"use an existing PC". They are also fair critcisims of the
"go down to PC
>world / Dell / whoever." How, my experience of running the
mini-itx stuff
>(www.linitx.com) has given me an HA server that's paper-back sized, and
>very
>quiet. The thing I'd have done differently is buy a CF rather than a
hard
>disk - then it would have been silent.
>
>Don't get me wrong - Homevision is a great product, and I glad I bought
it.
>However, the standard for PC-based applications has been raised
>dramatically
>over the last few years...
>
>Mark
>

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