It would be nice.
Not to be negative but I highly doubt they're going to put in the engineering effort required to do that on a $149 hub though. But I could be wrong.
I would fully expect to be able to restore a backup, including radios, to a future version of The hub with different hardware though. So while that's not quite as good as a hot backup, it would be very minimal down time.
Same. For me, it would be icing on the cake if the MAC address of the network interface could be rewritten to be the MAC address of the old (non-functioning) hub. Then I wouldn't have to spend the time to reconfigure my DHCP server ..... and it would be a genuine drop-in replacement.
Glad to see this topic get some further mulling. Brought it up some time ago and got a lot of the same responses. It seems folk worked it a bit more here and proposed some ideas that would be nice compromises for an "almost hot swap".
I get that the boundaries of the standards & specs the industry is working within might not have been thought out as deeply in respect to reliability, resilience, and redundancy. But the standing suggestion that Home Automation is still hobby, not critical application or security worthy seems to be prime for being put to rest in the next rendition.
People are wishing for, expecting, and in fact trying ALL sorts of stuff that in my mind is CRITICAL (especially when it fails to be monitored and/or controlled).
It would be great to see HE find a way to bridge the gaps in a ways that allowed it to claim a superior product in this regard while we wait for the standards to evolve.
Lastly -
Again, I'll say that it is absurd for us to integrate a hub into our homes to monitor and control ALL sorts of stuff (beyond the lights), and not think that should be worthy of $200+. I'm not saying $200 worth of junk that dies in 18 months, I'm saying $200 worth of all the things that folks keep saying "they're not going to put that in this platform at the current price". For crying out loud, what are we spending on GOOD routers, switches, IP cameras, phones, ETC.
EDIT: Would I have two or three hubs at this price? No. But then maybe I wouldn't have to. OR maybe there would be a master at one price and slave at a lower price to deal with those remote or segregation requirements.
The emphasis with HE has always been for "home automation" and not for handling "critical systems". I know it gets a little fuzzy when including HSM but in general this thinking indicates that a hot failover capability even if easily doable would likely still be very low on the priority list.
However if planning on keeping HE for the long term you should probably have an additional activated but offline hub on hand regardless. Also recommend power backups (UPS) for the hub and network and maybe even a good redundant internet connection.
edit: AND a whole home surge protector installed as well.
I am with you all on this for the protect the hub but things will happen and the hub could lock up software wise or eventually someday it will just die. To me having things monitored and managed and having some way to have a second hub to keep an eye on it just makes sense.
I get the standard wasn't written to do this but it seems like it could be done especially if one vendor were to manage both hubs. Even having like a Hubitat Pro hub or something that would let it have this ability.
I have my hub powered using a PoE splitter which powers from my switch which is powered through a UPS. So it is protected power wise but eventually someday this thing will bite the dust and it would be nice to have some sort of backup plan in place before that happens. The backup plan now is to get a new hub and copy over to it but you have to have a cold spare on hand to copy to it. It would be nice to just have it automatically there.
I have to assume (heh) that this feature would be appealing for those who have whole house backup generators - a few hours of hub downtime doesn't matter if you can't automate the important things.
Hummmm,
As I naively ponder this.... being one of the fundamental hurdles to having a hot-swap or fail-over capability between two Hubs.
Yeah, of course we'd need 3rd Party/Zigbee adoption but is this not proof-of-concept on some level?
DO NOT LET THIS DERAIL THIS THREAD....just pointing this out.
Not sure I’m following. What’s the relationship between that thread and this one?
If you have a zigbee-only hub and flash the zigbee radio of a spare hub with the IEEE address of the original hub, you can possibly run both simultaneously (simply turning on the zigbee radio of the hot spare when the original dies).
After looking at Matter/Thread a little bit recently, it does appear that Thread 'might' solve this issue as well. It appears that Thread devices are joined to a Thread Mesh network, not to a single Thread 'hub' per se. A Thread network can have multiple Thread Border Routers, which will connect the Thread Mesh devices to a TCP/IP network. Thus, it appears that the multiple Border Routers must use some form of election process to determine which of them will perform the different roles.
TLDR: This page somewhat pertinent to the discussion about the future of redundancy in Home Automation networks...
At least it appears that the Matter/Thread team has thought about it and has designed things to eliminate single points of failure, where practical/feasible.
I suppose each "border" router can be thought of as being an IP gateway. And as it is possible to have multiple gateways for an IP network (or sub-network), making it somewhat easier to port that concept to Thread.
That is kind of what I was getting at when I originally thought of this. Is that this could sort of sit there and be ready to take over but not active. Then just a MAC address change and bam it is online. If one vendor controls it all then even better and I mean I would pay for backup service so I don't have to mess with it. I am sure most of us would when you have a mega big network of stuff setup it is a pain when something goes down or changes.
There is the whole downtime factor but also the reliability factor but the Hubitat has been pretty solid. Eventually it will fail it is a machine it will break.
Just to have something or have some sort of way to clone the original network then move the controller to a new device and boom you are back.
Download the Hubitat app
