Last night while trying to setup a new virtual presence connected to Homebridge, my Hubitat C-7 hub locked up and stopped responding to http requests. I unplugged it, let it sit for a couple of minutes and restarted it. The LED on the front was green, but again there was no web response. I tried the diagnostic entry on port 8081 and still no luck. I tried doing a network ping on the device and it did not respond. I of course tried accusing it from different devices without luck. I did notice that my router saw it in its DHCP tables, but that was the only sign of life. It seemed to be totally locked up and unresponsive. It was late and I was tired so I went to bed.
I have about 85 physical and virtual devices. I have about 50 Z-wave devices which are a serious hassle to exclude and reset if you don't have a working hub. I was EXTREMELY nervous that I'd have to deal with moving everything to a new working hub - that'd easily be a job that would take me many, many evenings.
But luckily, this morning when I plugged the hub in, everything seemed to be working fine (though with some delays). Hopefully I'm out of the woods on this failure.
But it got me wondering - what can I do to prevent disasters in the future? My house is very dependent on my HA network working. I'm willing to buy a backup hub (or any other hardware) - is it possible to transfer the Z-Wave network info to a new device via backup or something like that? If I set up a hub mesh, will all of the hubs in the mesh be able to communicate with all of the devices? Short of that, is there any way to easily clean up and reset a large number of z-wave devices? What do people do to minimize this risk?
