David Trebacz Blog

I'm still having issues with the Honeywell wifi thermostat (RTH9580WF) displaying "waiting for update" on when the wifi is routed through my proxy server, so I decided to do a deep dive into what the thermostat is doing when it's getting the weather updates. I also wanted to better understand how to trace traffic on my network. Here's what I learned about the thermostats weather updates system by tracing the communication between the thermostat and servers. Currently: Thermostat requests the current weather and 12 hour forecast from a server:  http://104.209.185.251 . This server appears to run code managed by Honeywell in Microsoft's Azure cloud. Every 15 minutes it makes two port 80 GET requests to the IP address: http://104.209.185.251/WeatherAPIProd/api/weather/current?appKey=b9db7a3d469892e8&language=en-us&locationKey=36691_PC  (return current weather for location) http://104.209.185.251//WeatherAPIProd/api/weather/forecasts/hourly/12hou...

Just bought my wife a new thermostat for our house. We missed the HAI home automation thermostats in our previous house and their ability to display outdoor temperature. The NEST removed too much of our ability to control our thermostat and didn't show outdoor weather conditions. We choose the Honeywell RTH9580WF  (from Amazon) for a few reasons: RTH9580WF Outdoor Temperature - shows waiting for update Pros: Ability to control from a remotely Easy WiFi connectivity Reliable thermostat company Good 4 star plus reviews from Amazon Ability to show outdoor temperature and humidity Easy to use touchscreen and nice design Cons: C wire required No external temperature sensor Replacing  our existing heat pump thermostat was uneventful. I just carefully followed the instructions from Honeywell on how to install it. Our system was new enough to have a C-wire run but not connected to the existing thermostat. Honeywell's online tools and video helped me through this ...

For a few months I arpwatch has been reporting that "some device" on my home network is sending out packets that aren't properly formed. Unfortunately, the email that I get sent (via logcheck ) only sends me the mac address that's sending the bad packets. I did some checking around the internet and wasn't sure what I should do with that information - do I have a NIC going bad, bad cable, etc? My network is becoming a complicated systems of >40 devices running a variety of operating systems. I like using the linux utility arpwatch on my network, since combined with linux logcheck , it let's me know via email when any new DHCP device is added to my network. Seems like a great way to monitor if that crazy neighbor is snooping around at my wireless network. Even though they are pretty protected -separate network segment (courtesy of Smoothwall ). Anyway the email that I was getting two or three times a day looked like ...

I decided it was time to get all my machines on the same backup solution. I've been using  Backuppc  for quite awhile for my Windows boxes, but have been slower to move my Linux machines over. I really was challenged when I tried to backup my smoothwall firewall for my home network How difficult could it be. It's on a linux based operating system. At first I had issues with tar exited with error 65280 () status . All my troubleshooting seemed to point to a permissions error. Ultimately, the process below would have saved me a lot of troubleshooting and on the job learning. 1. Setup SSH public credentials between both machines (see http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/faq/ssh.html  OpenSSH section), so the user that BackupPC runs under can get the proper credentials to connect to the Smoothwall server, without physically typing in a password. 2. Modify the client transfer configuration for the non-standard tar location and SSH port...

I just noticed that the majority of the machines on my home network started failing with "No Ping Response" back in November. My storage is pretty redundant for most of my network so it took me some time to get around to figuring out the issue. In my case the machine have been faithfully backed up by a linux machine running BackupPC ( http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/ ) going on several years. On November 23rd (between 10 pm and midnight) that all changed. All of my DHCP Windows machines failed with the "no ping response". I knew the machines were up, but why was BackupPC not seeing them -or at least reporting a ping failure. Turns out this was all caused by a change I had made to my Smoothwall 3.0 firewall . I had removed the Services > Static DNS entries from Smoothwall doing some routine maintenance -I think. I mean why would you have static DNS entries for machines that have their IP addresses dynamically assigned. Ultimately, I found a solution to keep my...