I’ve just started working with a HomeSeer HomeTroller Zee device, something I am looking at using to help monitor the temperature in my house and control the heating, provided by a number of FIR (Far Infra Red) panels – Something recently purchased from Future Energy Solutions
In order to help develop some custom scripts on my HomeTroller Zee I started looking around and came across tenScripting3. This uses various plugins and addons for Microsoft Visual Studio to help write and debug your scripts.
The plugins can talk directly to your HomeSeer installation in order to update scripts and also monitor activity in real time, however, in order to do this it requires a Windows File Share, or in the case of Linux, a SMB share…
The HomeTroller Zee doesn’t come with Samba enabled by default and I was a little hesitant about messing about with the build of linux that is supplied pre-installed.
However, all is not lost. By using an intermediate system (Centos), it is possible to create a SMB share that is visible to your Windows Machine running Visual Studio and also share out the HomeSeer folder from your HomeTroller Zee…
We end up with something like this –
Visual Studio and the tenScripting3 apps think they are talking to the HomeTroller using a Windows File Share, however, they are talking to the CentOS server, which in turn is talking to the HomeTroller. The best part is that you don’t need to make any changes to the HomeTroller as that part of the connection uses SSH, which is already in place!
In order to get this working I did the following.
CentOS Server
Built a standard CentOS machine running as a virtual server – using VirtualBox on the desktop running Visual Studio,
Install samba
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yum install samba samba-client samba-common systemctl enable smb.service systemctl enable nmb.service systemctl restart smb.service systemctl restart nmb.service firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add service=samba firewall-cmd --reload yum install fuse-sshfs |
Configure Samba
/etc/samba/smb.conf
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[global] workgroup = WORKGROUP server string = Samba Server %v netbios name = centos security = user map to guest = bad user dns proxy = no #=== Share Definitions === [Anonymous] path = / browsable =yes writable = yes guest ok = yes read only = no [HomeSeer] path = /root/HomeSeer browsable = yes writable = yes guest ok = yes read only = no |
Edit the sshfs configuration file to allow Samba to share it out /etc/fuse.conf
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# mount_max = 1000 user_allow_other |
Create the folder where you are going to mount HomeTroller
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cd /root mkdir HomeSeer |
Finally, mount the HomeTroller remote filesystem
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sshfs root@192.168.1.1:/ /root/HomeSeer -o allow-other |
If all has gone well you should now be able to browse from your windows PC and see the HomeTroller files & folders.