Re: Upgrade HomeSeer to 2.0 ?

["Dean Roddey" <droddey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> OK.  But couldn't you use a PC with multiple com ports supported by the
> _OS_ to
> serve as an IP serial hub? I suppose that puts you in the serial hub
> "market"
> which may not be what you want.

Since CQC is fully distributed, and if you already have a PC there, we'd
just say load CQCServer there and let it do control locally and all of those
devices will then be available anywhere else on the network. That would be a
better deal for us, since you've already got the PC there anyway.

> And I still don't see why MSTSC/RDC isn't a solution. If I have CQS (or
> Homeseer, Cyberhouse, Premise) running on a local machine, why can't the
> program use the comm ports on a remote PC as if they were native? Or
> vice-versa? I use MSTS/RDC all day long with no problems. But I've just
> assumed
> that the comm ports work as advertised. Am I missing something?

Customers might not want to give us that level of control. Our scheme just
provides us access to serial ports and nothing else. And I'll probably set
it up so that customer can limit it to particular serial ports. So we have a
lot less 'liability' this way, since we can't possibly get into anything we
shouldn't or do any damage to the PC if we are writing drivers late at night
and are a bit foggy. Wouldn't want to erase their hard drive by accident or
anything :-)

The other thing is that unless they have Windows Server or something like
ThinSoft, then in order to RDP into their machine we lock them out of it
completely, AFAIK. XP only supports a single session, and if you RDP into it
you lose the local session. This way we don't prevent them from continuing
to use their automation system while we work on a driver.

-------------------------------------
Dean Roddey
Chairman/CTO, Charmed Quark Systems
www.charmedquark.com