Indigo Reliability

I walked into my bathroom tonight and hit the light switch. The light came on. The fan did not.

At the end of the day, that was my decision. I entrusted the job of turning on the fan to a headless 2011-vintage Mac Mini running Indigo 6.x.

As has happened more than once, the Mini had taken a software update and restarted. Despite my best effort to configure it for this eventuality, it had not auto-logged in and re-started Indigo.

I think we are all learning that IoT demands reliability. This architecture that I've put together with Indigo is not delivering.

How are you making your Indigo setup more reliable?

Remember that Indigo isn’t really IoT.. that term tends to be more used for items where the ‘hub’ is held somewhere on the cloud (although that is slowly improving) and isn’t generally considered to be a sensible idea. Out of interest what kind of devices are you using? Does indigo communicate with them directly or do they have some kind of API that requires a ‘cloud’ server to do what it needs to do?

As for stability of Indigo, i’ve personally found it rock solid. And i really mean it completely and utterly. More recent versions of OSX haven’t been quite as stable as we’d like, and just about every issue i’ve had over the last 2 years has been an OS issue. To improve stability of that general practices would be:

Disable Automatic Updates - BUT do keep a close eye on updates that become available for security purposes. (Also the Indigo Developers often check new OSX releases for compatibility, so always check here before updating.. and if you’re cautious wait for other users to post their experiences)

If possible make the Indigo server as dedicated as possible. I’d recommend against it being your primary machine.

Install a UPS to keep it running if there’s a power cut (obviously your devices won’t work but when it comes on again the mac will be able to pickup immediately)

Make sure that OSX is set to auto login. It’s also recommended to not have Indigo Client as a startup program as some people have reported odd behaviour with that (again looks like an OSX issue if memory serves)

That’s my thoughts on stability. I’ll be interested to see what other opinions come up here.

I suscribe what Durosity is pointing here.
I will add ...
To use exclusively ethernet wire instead of wifi for your indigo server.
Disable any sleeping mode for disks or cpu.
Disable any fancy, but cpu consuming, screen saver.
Don´t use virtualization software as Vmware, virtualbox, parallels ... because they can disturb your serial, usb, ehternet ports. and eat your RAM.

I also run Indigo on a headless Mac Mini, an older one too (Mid 2010 running El Capitan) and I rarely have issues and, when I do, it tends to be something else I'm running on that computer. My Mac is anything but dedicated to the task as well, it runs a VMWare session 24/7 and a number of other smaller processes.

As I've ventured further into Z-Wave I've experienced more issues and my general philosophy is that the further you get away from a wired solution the more issues come up. Really my only issues are that Insteon devices fail and Z-Wave works slightly slower. As an example, I use the Fibraro motion sensors for Z-Wave, it takes as much as 1 second for their trigger to reach Indigo through my Z-Wave dongle, whereas my wireless Insteon motion detectors hit it much faster.

Not knowing how you are set up I can't say for sure but the more hops you have between that device and the Indigo server the more likely you are to have an issue.

Sorry you are having issues.. I have never had an issue with Indigo reliability, I can measure uptime in months, My dedicated Mac mini runs a variety of other services including Security Spy / Kodi / iTunes / Airfoil / etc and is connected to a 1500VA APC UPS.

I have been hesitant to upgrade past 10.8.5 as it has been so stable, but I am going to be forced to take the leap to 10.9 mid April as there are a few apps that require 10.9 as a minimum that I would like to utilize the new features.. (Airfoil 5)

I agree that the auto upgrades are a pain, I have shut all off that I can but you still do need to monitor the OS X box to see what has popped up. I am in my indigo machine daily tweaking something or managing content anyway.

[jay (support)]

If you have your Mac setup to auto login after a reboot, and it's not doing it, something is wrong with your OS install. You might want to consider backing up, wiping, and starting from scratch. Particularly if the Mac was ever used for things other than Indigo, there could be cruft that's causing this apparent bad behavior.

Turning off auto updates is definitely something I'd do on a dedicated Mac. Change adds to system instability - so you want to be much more deliberate about introducing change into a system.

Indigo can only be as stable as the underlying platform since we don't provide the entire hardware/software stack.

I also run Indigo on a headless mini server (mid-2011) with El Capitan. I've had zero issues with Indigo and my only problems came when I originally added Server 5 (which failed miserably). After a clean install of El Capitan and a clean install of Server, I finally have the OS up and running with out issue. Indigo has been more stable than the OS throughout. I mostly use Indigo with Insteon devices (all purchased in the last 4 months) and more recently have added some One Wire sensors to monitor temperature and humidity (24/7 monitoring with alarms).

For the mini, I have the 'energy saver' settings to never allow the system to sleep but I do allow it to put the hard disks to sleep when possible. I also have it set to auto log in and for Indigo to laugh at login. All that works fine.

By the way, if you don't have one of these (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FLZXGJ6?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00) you should get one. It really makes the remote display for a headless mini to a larger monitor much better.