Centrica: Server fault on Wednesday caused Hive to crash on the Tuesday. Yes, yes, that's what we said Centrica has pinned last week's 36-hour freeze of its Hive app estate – the one that coincided with the plunging temperatures in Britain – on a server fault it claims happened, er, a day after the outage actually began. On Tuesday 2 April, users were forced to manually alter home thermostats and surveillance controls after the …
"owned by one of our external service providers"
ALL Centrica's servers are owned by external service providers so that's no excuse. I'm going to go with HP probably screwed this one up, and maybe Centrica didn't check that the design was fault tolerant / able to failover or even monitored?
a server, owned by one of our external service providers
So Hive owners have outsourced the operation of their heating systems to Centrica, Centrica have outsourced to a number of external providers and they have possibly outsourced to someone else.
There's a lot to be said for a bimetallic strip and a microswitch...
Not only "A server" but their solution is to make sure it doesn't go offline again. I expect with a stern scolding.
Rather than removing the single point of failure. Although I suspect a more detailed review of the incident would like reveal that the "point" in question was significantly larger than a single server. And contained many people currently re-applying the teflon to their shoulders and researching where to spend their bonuses.
Hi this is Eddy your Centrica wide computer!
Our Hive controlled Flux Capacitor went offline Wednesday morning 3rd April creating a loop in the space time continuum that caused your device to fail Tuesday 2nd April, this was finally resolved on Monday 1st April through a wormhole and all systems are now functioning within 10 decimal places of normal parameters.
Please feel free to go stick your head in a pig.
Share and Enjoy!!!
I bet they "value their customers" as well.
Announcement from White Start Line on news of the Titanic iceberg downtime.
"We value our customers and we are seeking to leverage the functionality of the ship's lifeboats using best practices to restore personal flotation within industry leading service level targets."
or something.
does a central heating thermostat in my house need a round trip to anywhere outside my house to turn the ****ing heating on ?
Sorry, who thought this was ever a good idea ?
Given the decreasing quality of almost everything these days, the less I need from any third parties the better.
I assume that the thermostat does not actually have a thermostat program on it. It just constantly sends sensor data somewhere, and gets told what to do. This probably made sense to someone who was thinking about absurdly complex thermostat programs that talk to, I dunno, weather services or whatnot, and need to get updated every two hours, because agile.
And I guess that the notion of having a basic thermostat program available locally, and fall back on it when the server is down, did not occur to them.
A program that automatically learns the thermal characteristics of your house, reading external & internal temperature sensors so as to control the heating/cooling in order to reach the desired temperature at the time programmed (& keep it there) can easily be written and run on a cheap low power 8 bit CPU. It does not require the power of an external server, and I have never seen any sense in using an external server except to make money by making it a pay service.
There is absolutely no point in bringing weather forecasts into the mix (which in any event give average temperatures for a region, not the temperature around a particular property).
The external server does serve a useful purpose. If I've been away from home for a week or two, and it's been very cold, I can turn the heating on remotely a few hours before I get home to warm the house through. Or, conversely, I can turn the heating off remotely if I've gone away and forgotten to do so.
I guess it's up to the individual whether that's worth the down sides.
That doesn't need a remote server, just a open port or similar on the system to allow you to connect back to it.
Even if you want to use a remote server for this it should only act as a gateway/forwarding tool where you home device checks in to it regularly to see if there are any instructions for it.
That way if the remote server or your home's network connection goes down everything local still works (i.e. scheduled temperature changes etc) will still work and only extra changes won't happen.
This is they way I have seen some Z-Wave home automation systems working, you have the option of signing up for a web service or doing everything locally or both
I don't think your average gas fitter or consumer would know how to open ports on the router, so I don't think that's a (commercially) practical option. The server approach would be vulnerable to server failures regardless of how things were working.
I agree, though, that more autonomy would be better, so 'no server' means 'carry on as normal'. Does it not work that way? Ours is under manual control (no timers), so we didn't see much difference.
average gas fitter or consumer would know how to open ports on the router
Much like yer average OpenWoe engineer doesn't really know anything about anything other than how to join a few wires together, plug them into your router and then run the automated test that says everything is working (even when it's not). And then notice that he hasn't actually plugged in the BT interface box and he's trying to feed a G.Fast signal directly into the ethernet port on the back of the router..
Not that I have recent experience of that of course.
The press release was probably written by their engineer who was scheduled to call on me a few years back between 1pm and 6pm, and left a card through the door at 11:30am saying there was no-one there and to rebook a new appointment (doubly irritating as I was actually in then too, but there was no knock or doorbell ring either).
There was a knock - and if you'd had a stethoscope on the door you may well have heard it.
I'ver been in the same situation and was lucky enough to be picking up the post when the faintest of knocks happened, the chap was already starting to leave when I opened the door.
This post has been deleted by its author
Well it would crash-and-burn seeing as their HiveHome dashboard is connected through twisted pair copper wires designed in the late nineteenth century. And putting your webcam on the Internet isn't going to add security. All it'll do is alert the burger to when you're not home.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
