5 ms·

You can access the device when you're away from home if it's internet connected. Of course, the server doesn't need to be doing much besides proxying connection

by nijave 3y ago

You can access the device when you're away from home if it's internet connected. Of course, the server doesn't need to be doing much besides proxying connections.

cassianoleal 3y ago
And of course, you can easily run a VPN/Tailscale/ZeroTier/whatever to achieve the same without the downsides.
- api 3y ago
  There are home assistant integrations for all of those. HA can also open a port via uPnP and use Letsencrypt. You don’t need a cloud server to remotely access a device.
- colinmorelli 3y ago
  I'm quite confident my parents and the many people like them in the world would not find running VPN/Tailscale/ZeroTier to be "easy." Nor would they have any idea how to troubleshoot when those services have issues. Nor would they want to play intermediary between Tailscale and myQ customer support to figure out which one is broken and fix it. Having options like this is great for powerusers, but the vast majority of people are not that. They need something that just works. Of course that still doesn't mean they need their garage door collecting telemetry data, but they need something more than a LAN-connected smart device.
  - iAMkenough 3y ago
    Sounds like there's a market for intermediary tech support
    - colinmorelli 3y ago
      Perhaps in general, but if the problem here is "I don't want a corporation to have access to when my garage door is open or closed" I can't fathom how "Give another corporation access to my entire network to troubleshoot my VPN and LAN configuration of my devices" is the solution?
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        The solution is to "give my tech whiz kid/neighbor/friend, or a local IT shop two blocks over, the responsibility of managing my home network". This is where ideas like non-shit IoT, Right to Repair, Free (Libre) Software, and even "how to not fuck up foreign aid 101", all converge. The point isn't to make everyone their tech support. The point is to allow local communities to be more self-sufficient, able to manage technology on their own - as opposed to outsourcing everything to some faceless companies that have no attachment to any given community. Note that this doesn't preclude business - on the contrary, local businesses are the fundamental part of any community larger than couple dozen people; the ideas converge not on everyone doing stuff pro bono, but on small, local businesses* doing things for their communities, accumulating and retaining know-how. I wish more people from aforementioned movements realized their ultimate goal (at least in form that's possible in the real world) is the same, and joined forces.
    - kube-system 3y ago
      If your mass-market commercial product needs this by design, you will fail. To successfully sell a product to the general public, it must work out of the box.
      - jollyllama 3y ago
        True, but there's contractors for pretty much everything else that can be installed on your home. Why not home automation contractors?
        kube-system 3y ago
        They exist, but they're expensive. And the products they sell are not really consumer devices, they are B2B products marketed at contractors. They're really two different markets, the bulk of the home automation market doesn't want to spend $10K+ for a contractor to check the same feature boxes that something on the shelf at Home Depot can do for a 3-digit price tag. Labor is really expensive, so home automation contractors operate almost exclusively on the high-end of the market.
  - epiecs 3y ago
    They can just pay for home assistant cloud?
    - colinmorelli 3y ago
      1) Home Assistant is not an officially sanctioned option by the devices and will run into technical issues regardless whether it's cloud hosted or not (as seen by the very post we're all commenting on). 2) Even if the above were not true, at that point you're back to an internet enabled smart home device system, and now we're simply picking which vendor to trust over the other. But in both cases, the option for the vendor to collect telemetry data about your usage of the products exists. There is really no viable way for the typical consumer to be able to both have a good product experience for something like this, and to prevent a cloud vendor from having access to their data. Unless I'm missing something obvious.
      - lloeki 3y ago
        > Even if the above were not true, at that point you're back to an internet enabled smart home device system Home Assistant Cloud is essentially a TCP-level proxy (IOW Nabu Casa sees jack squat): > The remote UI encrypts all communication between your browser and your local instance. Encryption is provided by a Let’s Encrypt certificate. Under the hood, your local Home Assistant instance is connected to one of our custom built UI proxy servers. Our UI proxy servers operate at the TCP level and will forward all encrypted data to the local instance. > Routing is made possible by the Server Name Indication (SNI) extension on the TLS handshake. It contains the information for which hostname an incoming request is destined, and we forward this information to the matching local instance. To be able to route multiple simultaneous requests, all data will be routed via a TCP multiplexer. The local Home Assistant instance will receive the TCP packets, demultiplex them, decrypt them with the SSL certificate and forward them to the HTTP component. > The source code is available on GitHub: > SniTun - End-to-End encryption with SNI proxy on top of a TCP multiplexer > hass-nabucasa - Cloud integration in Home Assistant https://www.nabucasa.com/config/remote/#how-it-works https://www.nabucasa.com/config/remote/#how-it-works https://www.nabucasa.com/config/remote/#security https://www.nabucasa.com/config/remote/#security
  - MadnessASAP 3y ago
    My wife doesn't understand what I do on the computer all the time and she's pretty doubtful of my claim that server racks are normal household items. Nevertheless setting up the HA app on her phone with a Wireguard VPN was super simple and she's got a good handle on that. That being said, setting up the HA and Wireguard server is definitely a more demanding experience. Although once setup it's pretty much a once and done sort of thing, and they're are integrated ready to go solutions available. It would be nice to see something like "Geek Squad" offering that sort of service instead of just running AV software while trawling for nudes on customer laptops. No guesses on what's more profitable though.
    - nvy 3y ago
      >she's pretty doubtful of my claim that server racks are normal household items. Haha, she's got you there.
      - 20after4 3y ago
        Racks of gear are completely normal if you're a serious musician or computer user.
    - Eduard 3y ago
      > Although once setup it's pretty much a once and done sort of thing I guess you started using Home Assistance recently / shortly... and/or you use only a few HA integrations. Otherwise, you would have already run into enough troubles with updates.
- freedomben 3y ago
  I refuse to use cloud services, and I use tail scale, but telling the average consumer to do this instead of using whatever app came with the device is not going to work for most people
- fullspectrumdev 3y ago
  > easily Not for the average consumer. I actually have gotten to know a lot of folks who are massive into home automation, who also know precisely fuck all about computers or whatnot.
- WirelessGigabit 3y ago
  Most VPNs need significantly extra work to get notifications to pass through. For example, Apple Home does not work by default over WireGuard.
RobotToaster 3y ago
Why would you need to access a garage door opener when away from home?
- heartbreak 3y ago
  To let in your cat sitter.
- eknkc 3y ago
  Check if you left it open? Let someone in remotely?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- pmontra 3y ago
  I forgot it open.
  - _ZeD_ 3y ago
    the real solution here is to make it auto close locally.
    - pmontra 3y ago
      That's a nice to have feature. However there are cases when one wants to keep it open for hours or, as pointed by other replies, to open it to let somebody in. An edge case I just thought about: open it to let somebody delivery a package inside, possibly by looking at them with a camera, and then close it.
- neodymiumphish 3y ago
  Give access to a friend or family member when you're out of town. Allow package deliverers to put a package in your garage instead of on your step. When I had MyQ, I used it almost exclusively when I was on my motorcycle. I had it configured so that I could tap a button on my phone that tracked my location and enabled a geofence around my house so it would ping the MyQ to open when I got about a quarter mile from home. I called this my "riding home" mode. This saved me the trouble of having to get my gloves off and open the door through the app when I got to my driveway, and I didn't have to leave a garage door opener on/with my bike.
tmccrary55 3y ago
You can also just do both. I'd rather that it use the LAN, if I'm there at the time. Data collection and remote access can just be their own functionality.
tensor 3y ago
Homekit provides this as well, and by default is local only. There really is no excuse for these devices not to support homekit out of the box other than a money grab.

by nijave 3y ago

You can access the device when you're away from home if it's internet connected. Of course, the server doesn't need to be doing much besides proxying connections.

cassianoleal 3y ago

And of course, you can easily run a VPN/Tailscale/ZeroTier/whatever to achieve the same without the downsides.

api 3y ago
There are home assistant integrations for all of those. HA can also open a port via uPnP and use Letsencrypt. You don’t need a cloud server to remotely access a device.
colinmorelli 3y ago
I'm quite confident my parents and the many people like them in the world would not find running VPN/Tailscale/ZeroTier to be "easy." Nor would they have any idea how to troubleshoot when those services have issues. Nor would they want to play intermediary between Tailscale and myQ customer support to figure out which one is broken and fix it. Having options like this is great for powerusers, but the vast majority of people are not that. They need something that just works. Of course that still doesn't mean they need their garage door collecting telemetry data, but they need something more than a LAN-connected smart device.
- iAMkenough 3y ago
  Sounds like there's a market for intermediary tech support
  - colinmorelli 3y ago
    Perhaps in general, but if the problem here is "I don't want a corporation to have access to when my garage door is open or closed" I can't fathom how "Give another corporation access to my entire network to troubleshoot my VPN and LAN configuration of my devices" is the solution?
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      The solution is to "give my tech whiz kid/neighbor/friend, or a local IT shop two blocks over, the responsibility of managing my home network". This is where ideas like non-shit IoT, Right to Repair, Free (Libre) Software, and even "how to not fuck up foreign aid 101", all converge. The point isn't to make everyone their tech support. The point is to allow local communities to be more self-sufficient, able to manage technology on their own - as opposed to outsourcing everything to some faceless companies that have no attachment to any given community. Note that this doesn't preclude business - on the contrary, local businesses are the fundamental part of any community larger than couple dozen people; the ideas converge not on everyone doing stuff pro bono, but on small, local businesses* doing things for their communities, accumulating and retaining know-how. I wish more people from aforementioned movements realized their ultimate goal (at least in form that's possible in the real world) is the same, and joined forces.
  - kube-system 3y ago
    If your mass-market commercial product needs this by design, you will fail. To successfully sell a product to the general public, it must work out of the box.
    - jollyllama 3y ago
      True, but there's contractors for pretty much everything else that can be installed on your home. Why not home automation contractors?
      - kube-system 3y ago
        They exist, but they're expensive. And the products they sell are not really consumer devices, they are B2B products marketed at contractors. They're really two different markets, the bulk of the home automation market doesn't want to spend $10K+ for a contractor to check the same feature boxes that something on the shelf at Home Depot can do for a 3-digit price tag. Labor is really expensive, so home automation contractors operate almost exclusively on the high-end of the market.
- epiecs 3y ago
  They can just pay for home assistant cloud?
  - colinmorelli 3y ago
    1) Home Assistant is not an officially sanctioned option by the devices and will run into technical issues regardless whether it's cloud hosted or not (as seen by the very post we're all commenting on). 2) Even if the above were not true, at that point you're back to an internet enabled smart home device system, and now we're simply picking which vendor to trust over the other. But in both cases, the option for the vendor to collect telemetry data about your usage of the products exists. There is really no viable way for the typical consumer to be able to both have a good product experience for something like this, and to prevent a cloud vendor from having access to their data. Unless I'm missing something obvious.
    - lloeki 3y ago
      > Even if the above were not true, at that point you're back to an internet enabled smart home device system Home Assistant Cloud is essentially a TCP-level proxy (IOW Nabu Casa sees jack squat): > The remote UI encrypts all communication between your browser and your local instance. Encryption is provided by a Let’s Encrypt certificate. Under the hood, your local Home Assistant instance is connected to one of our custom built UI proxy servers. Our UI proxy servers operate at the TCP level and will forward all encrypted data to the local instance. > Routing is made possible by the Server Name Indication (SNI) extension on the TLS handshake. It contains the information for which hostname an incoming request is destined, and we forward this information to the matching local instance. To be able to route multiple simultaneous requests, all data will be routed via a TCP multiplexer. The local Home Assistant instance will receive the TCP packets, demultiplex them, decrypt them with the SSL certificate and forward them to the HTTP component. > The source code is available on GitHub: > SniTun - End-to-End encryption with SNI proxy on top of a TCP multiplexer > hass-nabucasa - Cloud integration in Home Assistant https://www.nabucasa.com/config/remote/#how-it-works https://www.nabucasa.com/config/remote/#how-it-works https://www.nabucasa.com/config/remote/#security https://www.nabucasa.com/config/remote/#security
- MadnessASAP 3y ago
  My wife doesn't understand what I do on the computer all the time and she's pretty doubtful of my claim that server racks are normal household items. Nevertheless setting up the HA app on her phone with a Wireguard VPN was super simple and she's got a good handle on that. That being said, setting up the HA and Wireguard server is definitely a more demanding experience. Although once setup it's pretty much a once and done sort of thing, and they're are integrated ready to go solutions available. It would be nice to see something like "Geek Squad" offering that sort of service instead of just running AV software while trawling for nudes on customer laptops. No guesses on what's more profitable though.
  - nvy 3y ago
    >she's pretty doubtful of my claim that server racks are normal household items. Haha, she's got you there.
    - 20after4 3y ago
      Racks of gear are completely normal if you're a serious musician or computer user.
  - Eduard 3y ago
    > Although once setup it's pretty much a once and done sort of thing I guess you started using Home Assistance recently / shortly... and/or you use only a few HA integrations. Otherwise, you would have already run into enough troubles with updates.
freedomben 3y ago
I refuse to use cloud services, and I use tail scale, but telling the average consumer to do this instead of using whatever app came with the device is not going to work for most people
fullspectrumdev 3y ago
> easily Not for the average consumer. I actually have gotten to know a lot of folks who are massive into home automation, who also know precisely fuck all about computers or whatnot.
WirelessGigabit 3y ago
Most VPNs need significantly extra work to get notifications to pass through. For example, Apple Home does not work by default over WireGuard.

RobotToaster 3y ago

Why would you need to access a garage door opener when away from home?

heartbreak 3y ago
To let in your cat sitter.
eknkc 3y ago
Check if you left it open? Let someone in remotely?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pmontra 3y ago
I forgot it open.
- _ZeD_ 3y ago
  the real solution here is to make it auto close locally.
  - pmontra 3y ago
    That's a nice to have feature. However there are cases when one wants to keep it open for hours or, as pointed by other replies, to open it to let somebody in. An edge case I just thought about: open it to let somebody delivery a package inside, possibly by looking at them with a camera, and then close it.
neodymiumphish 3y ago
Give access to a friend or family member when you're out of town. Allow package deliverers to put a package in your garage instead of on your step. When I had MyQ, I used it almost exclusively when I was on my motorcycle. I had it configured so that I could tap a button on my phone that tracked my location and enabled a geofence around my house so it would ping the MyQ to open when I got about a quarter mile from home. I called this my "riding home" mode. This saved me the trouble of having to get my gloves off and open the door through the app when I got to my driveway, and I didn't have to leave a garage door opener on/with my bike.

tmccrary55 3y ago

You can also just do both. I'd rather that it use the LAN, if I'm there at the time. Data collection and remote access can just be their own functionality.

tensor 3y ago

Homekit provides this as well, and by default is local only. There really is no excuse for these devices not to support homekit out of the box other than a money grab.