Feedback: My first Homegear installation on Rasbberry Pi

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#1

Hi, I just found the Homegear project some days ago a I thought it might by exactly what I need for my private project. Here is some feedback about my installation, maybe it’s useful for you. I guess I will have more questions once I start configuring the system…

I’m running a Raspberry Pi with Wheezy.
I downloaded Homegear version 0.3.1-2.

  1. Installation does not work exactly as explained in https://www.homegear.eu/index.php/Installing_and_Configuring_Homegear. I tried to install the downlaoded Debian archive, but there were complaints about missing packages. (I tried to upload the messages, but the forum software did not let me do that…) At least, “p7zip-full” was missing. The installation how-to says that additional packages are needed only when building Homegear from source. This seems to be wrong. Well, after I installed all mentioned packages (sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev libreadline6 libreadline6-dev g+±4.7 unzip p7zip-full libssl1.0.0 libssl-dev) the installation started as expected. Maybe you can add the list of packages which are to be installed when not building the system from source.

  2. During installation host “www.eq-3.de” was not reachable (due to some obscure network errors or due to problems at eq.3.de, I don’t know). This error situation was detetced and protocolled on the console, but the installer did not stop! So I ended up in a incomplete homegear installation (e.g. without device XML files etc.). I recommend to abort installation whenever an external file could not be downloaded. I restarted the installation some minutes later, and the second time everything went ok and homegear was installed as expected. Even my configuration file which I changed inbetween was not overwritten, cool!

Cheers,
Klaus

#2

Hey Klaus,

thanks for your feedback. I now added the prerequisites to the installation instructions. And the next version of the debian package will check if the download of the XML files was successful :wink:.

Have fun experimenting with Homegear :smiley:.

Cheers,
Sathya

#3

For me, everything worked really fine and it was very easy to do it. The only thing I would have liked is an option to switch off the certificate creation. The step took almost 2 full hours on my raspberry pi and I was really excited and wanted to start playing right away :slight_smile:

Maybe you could add some configuration option for the certificate generation, so impatient guys like myself could do that manually later on :smiley:

#4

I will add a yes/no question to the setup, if you want to create the Diffie-Hellman parameters file :wink:. I’m kind of a security fanatic and really paranoid, that’s why I decided to create everything necessary for encryption during the setup. But as most of the clients (sadly) don’t support encryption anyway, it makes sense to add the option to not create the Diffie-Hellman parameters by default.
Currently you can just kill openssl in a second SSH or terminal session. Homegear will work anyway.

#5

I was tempted but I didn’t dare to do this :wink: