Smartthings to Home Assistant using MQTT

I have been away for a while, but in my absence I have been playing with a Home Automation System called Home Assistant. You can find out more about it here on their website: https://home-assistant.io/ 

One of my Father's Day Gifts from my Wife and Kids was a SmarThing Hub with a Arrival sensor. Now Home Assistant has literally hundreds of pre-built integrations however SmartThings is not one of them. To make it work with Home Assistant you will have to use a protocol called MQTT which is very versatile and can be used to create your own Automations.  (Find out more about it here.)

Now my Home Assistant instance is running on a Rasberry Pi 3 (also a Father's Day Gift) however it also runs on a Raspberry Pi 2. I am also running HASSbain which is a Raspian image created by Home Assistant. As for MQTT there are a few products out there that you can use, I prefer Mosquitto as there seems to be more guides out there on how to configure and manage it.

Start off by checking for and installing updates for Raspian:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

this could take a while depending on your setup.

Next you will need to setup the smarthings-mqtt-bridge via npm
sudo apt-get install npm

sudo npm install -g smartthings-mqtt-bridge

Then you will need to setup pm2 to run the processes
sudo npm install pm2 -g

Once installed you will need to create and edit smartthings-mqtt-bridge config
sudo cp /usr/local/lib/node_modules/smartthings-mqtt-bridge/_config.yml ~/config.yml

sudo nano ~/config.yml
Here is what the mqtt-bridge-configuration ~/config.yml file should look like if all is configured correctly.
mqtt:
  # Specify your MQTT Broker's hostname or IP address here
  host: mqtt://localhost
  # Preface for the topics $PREFACE/$DEVICE_NAME/$PROPERTY
  preface: smartthings

  # Suffix for the state topics $PREFACE/$DEVICE_NAME/$PROPERTY/$STATE_SUFFIX
  # state_suffix: state
  # Suffix for the command topics $PREFACE/$DEVICE_NAME/$PROPERTY/$COMMAND_SUFFIX
  # command_suffix: cmd

  # Other optional settings from https://www.npmjs.com/package/mqtt#mqttclientstreambuilder-options
  username: pi
  password: mqttpass

  # Port number to listen on
  port: 8080

Now that all of the local configurations have been completed you need to configure the SmartThings Device handler, Device, and SmartApp using steps outlined in https://github.com/stjohnjohnson/smartthings-mqtt-bridge150

Device Settings
IP: raspberry pi IP
MAC: Raspberry pi MAC
Port: 8080

Next you will need to add mqtt to HomeAssistant config configuration.yaml
mqtt:
  broker: localhost
  port: 1883
  client_id: home-assistant-1
  username: pi
  password: mqttpass

Now you will need to add your devices to their own file, or configuration.yaml
Since I am using mine for presence detection mine looks something like this

device_tracker:
  - platform: mqtt
    name: "MQTT Presense Detection"
    devices: 
      Friendly Name: smartthings/device name/presence
      Friendly Name1: smartthings/device name/presence
     
Now you will need to start the bridge

sudo ln -s "$(which nodejs)" /usr/local/bin/node
pm2 restart smartthings-mqtt-bridge

restart Home Assistant
sudo systemctl restart home-assistant.service

That should do it. You may want to sudo reboot


In the future I may do more of these as I have learned at lot from it, including beginning to dabble with Docker.

Outlook for Mac user unable to see shared Calendars

One of my users came to me with an issue regarding his Outlook for Mac Client. He said he was able to see a persons calendar but when he opened them up they were blank.

Most of our users are using Outlook 2013 on either Windows 7/8/10 and are not having this issue. After about an hour of searching online and digging through message boards I discovered that someone has suggested changing the permissions that the user is granting to Full Details. The default setting is Availability only.


Although this is not something I discovered on my own I figured I would share it anyway as it may help someone down the line.

Scenario 004 - Issue with connecting to NETAPP OnCommand System Manager

It has been a while since I did one of these posts do I figured I would try to get back to it. 

Today I was working at a client site and I had to make some changes to one of their VMs to increase storage. While working on their management host I attempted to connect to their NetApp OnCommand System Manager when I was presented with this:

Having seen this so many times I figured I would share the solution. The error message above is telling you that the file SystemManager.ks is corrupt. This file can be renamed and is located here:

C:\Users\<username>\NetApp\SystemManager\

Once you rename the file all you have to do it close you IE window and try again.

Exchange 2016 - Issue with changing URL for MAPI connections

As you know when you installed Exchange all of the Virtual Directories use the FQDN of the server as the URLs for the Exchange Virtual Directories. If your Exchange server is being used for OWA or CAS you will most likely have a SSL Cerfiticate to prevent you from getting those pesky SSL errors.

During an install that I recently did I ran into an issue where all the outlook clients were getting SSL pop up messages that looked like this:

From the message you are able to see that the name of the certificate does not match the server name. So I logged into the Exchange Admin Center and looked under Servers > Virtual Directories and checked each of the Virtual Directories listed. As this was my first 2016 installation I discovered that there was a virtual directory for mapi. So from the web interface I changed the internal url to match the name of the certificate "https://Mail.Domain.com/mapi" and restarted IIS. After that I go and try and configure an outlook client and good news I no longer get the SSL Error, but now I am unable to authenticate to the mailbox!!!

After playing around with it for a while I discovered that changing the name back did not fix the issue so I was forced to do a rebuild on the virtual directory and that took me back to square 1.

After hours of searching online for an answer I found this powershell command that worked


Set-mapivirtualdirectory -identity "[SERVERNAME]\mapi (default Web Site)" -internalurl  https://Mail.DOMAIN.com/mapi

After doing this command I restarted IIS again and the clients are now able to connect without issue.

UPDATE on this issue:

I would appear that do to a misconfiguration in the client's internal DNS their Autodiscover.domain.local was a A record and not a CNAME which it appears that outlook autodiscover does not like. So I changed the record to a CNAME by deleting the A record and recreating it. Then I went to a local machine and did a IPCONFIG /FLUSHDNS and then restarted outlook and that seems to have fixed the issue.

Scenario 003 - Mapping a network drive to a server in a workgroup environment

Back Story:

Recently I was working at a client who have a Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials server not setup in as an Active Directory Domain. The client machines are Windows XP SP 3 x86 system and they are running a DOS application that is the back bone of their business. It serves as CRM, billing, and inventory system. Everything was working just fine when one of their client machines died (System Board died) so they needed to purchase a replacement system. They went with a brand new Dell Optiplex running Windows 7 x64 system.

When I went down to setup the system I discovered that the DOS program would not work (no shock there) however even compatibility mode failed me this time (although I don't think I have ever seen it work). So my choices were to try and rebuild the system as Windows XP or build a VM that runs Windows XP. Obviously since they do not make drivers for Windows XP anymore for newer systems so I installed VMware Workstation Player on the computer and build a Windows XP virtual machine.

Once the machine was built I then needed to map a network drive to the server that was hosting the DOS application. I was able to map the drive using Windows Explorer but found out that once I did a reboot the credentials did not keep (even after checking the box that said remember credentials).


Problem:

Windows XP Virtual Machine will not keep credentials for network drive after log off or reboot. The drive would continue to be mapped however end user would need to provide credentials for Server every time. Both Server and Workstation are in a Workgroup and not a Domain.

Solution:

I created a logon script and placed it the startup folder of the user account that would remap the drive at every login and would use the credentials on the server to allow the workstation to access the application.

The syntax I used was:

NET USE G: \\SERVERNAME\SHARENAME /USER SERVERNAME\USERNAME PASSWORD

NOTE: I was not the one who setup this network so unfortunately it was not setup the way that I would have done it so I had to jump through all these hoops to get the job done.

Scenario 002 - Computer Hard Disk Drive crashed or not working

Recently I was picking my kids up from a family friend's house and through normal chit chat in the conversation it was brought up that their family computer's HDD had failed or "Crashed". After giving them my sympathy for their loss (some work document and Tons of Family Photos and Videos) something clicked in my brain. I have been out of the game for a long time in terms of being a full time desktop support technician, not to say that I do not do it, however my sights are now on Virtualization and Messaging these days. Anyway back in the day when I used to work for large companies doing desk side support where end users would prefer to save data to their local HDD rather than network drive due to 10 Meg Ethernet or Token Ring network connection (no this is not meant to age me but rather how old the network was).

So lets just say that because this was the norm for their corporate culture we had a lot of issues with people losing data. However my team and I became very good at performing miracles and bring a drive back from the dead.

While this is still in my head I figured I would share this information with you.


Please note that I am not taking responsibility for any damage that you may do to equipment. This is just to share my war stories and if it helps someone out of a bind then great!

Issue:
 Drive will not spin up or there is a clicking noise

Solution:
Try sticking the HDD into the freezer for a few hours (we used to do about 16 hours) and then try to power the drive up again. More times than not it will work but your time is limited so get your data quickly.

Notes:
Do not put your drive on top of ice or anything moist (putting it into a plastic bag might be smart).

Issue:
Drive powers on and spins with no clicking but is not detected by OS or BIOS.

Solution:
Here is where working for a large company with tons of machines with the same model comes in handy. If you have a spare drive that is the same Make and Model you can use a torx screw driver to take the controller card off of the drive and put it onto the defective drive. This should allow the drive to be seen by the OS so you can get your data off.

Notes:
By doing this you are voiding the warranty of your drives so make sure you know the risk before you proceed.

Scenario 001 - You have a remote user who says they are not able to connect to the VPN. Claims that their password may have expired.

So you come in Monday morning and you get a phone call from your Director of Sales who says he is unable to log into the VPN. He is on the road all week in Canada and is not able to have you remote in to see what is going on. He has 30 minutes to prep for a very important meeting and he left his powerpoint deck on his H: Drive. He also tells you that he thinks he saw a message telling him that he needed to reset his password for the last two weeks but he just forgot to do it.

How can you find out what  is going on with his account?

Since we are working with a Microsoft AD environment there are hundreds (if not thousands) of ways to find your answer. One of my favorite ways to see what is going on with a AD account is by using NET USER "Username" /DOMAIN

This command will give you every piece of information about the user account that you could want including:

•  AD Group Memberships
• Last time the Password was reset
• When is the next time it can be reset.

Next time you have a chance to play with your AD Domain try familiarizing yourself with this Command as it may help you in the future.