That's fair. Thanks for answering with a workaround at least

@toggledbits, not sure if this is a feature request or I'm using the search tool wrong. You have a "Search for rule" in the Rules Set tab in MSR. It works nicely to find a rule and bring up said rule, but can it/could it be used for as a "where used?" global search? For instance, I have a fairly large set of rules, divided up into 10 different rulesets. There's easily a hundred individual rules, and many of the rules have Rule State triggers, which of course refer to other rules. Amongst my troubleshooting today, I came across what may have been a duplicate or troubleshooting attempt, but I can't tell if it's actually used as a Rule State in another rule without opening each rule that I suspect it may be a part of.

Thanks.

said in Need help figuring out how to delay a reset on reaction:

@gwp1 said in Need help figuring out how to delay a reset on reaction:

Essentially, don't try to do things with "one big beautiful ruleset"

Seriously. It can't be done in one, but sometimes I swear I've paired it down into so many individual functions, I forget how it all works together. When I'm troubleshooting, I have to go back and look at the rules, and think "what was I trying to do here again?"

@gwp1 said in Need help figuring out how to delay a reset on reaction:

Essentially, don't try to do things with "one big beautiful ruleset"

Seriously. It can't be done, but sometimes I swear I've paired it down into so many individual functions, I forget how it all works together. When I'm troubleshooting, I have to go back and look at the rules, and think "what was I trying to do here again?"

@gwp1, no only away. The Home mode is only 15 seconds.

However, since the "Phones Home" rule is a geofence rule (based upon the HA companion app), it detects the phone being there before I'm actually in the house. The Home mode does not disarm the alarm system, that is still manually done at the keypad. The only delay would be lights automatically turning on, or blinds opening during the day.

Test appears to be successful. I was able to use one of the guest users PINs for the alarm panel, and the system went into and stayed in Guest mode. Thanks to @gwp1 for reminding me to keep it simple and get rid of the reset.

Okay, this actually seems to be working. I needed to disarm my home alarm first, then put it in Guest mode. It appears be holding now.

Next test, is I need to disarm the system with one of the guest users to see if it stays disabled.

@gwp1 said in Need help figuring out how to delay a reset on reaction:

@tamorgen You're falling into the same pitfalls I did. Notice my Mode SETs don't have resets. No need. The next appropriate rule SETs so there's no reason to reset. Any resets (like from GUEST back to AWAY or VACA) are done via their own SET rulesets.

Okay, I think I've made progress thanks to your suggestion.

I took the thought of creating a new rule for "Go to Away Mode", and removed the reset from "Phones Home".

In the new "Go to Away Mode" rule, I added a condition that the mode needs to "Phones Home" rule needs to be sustained for 60 seconds.
This at least makes it specific, as to what my rules do.

Next I tried to toggle the house mode in Home Assistant, and well, it immediately changed to "Home", which is different than what I expected.

So now, the "Go To Home Mode" rule is being tripped. I added a very short 15 second "must be sustained" condition for the "Phones Home" rule state in that rule, and now it lets me change the drop down to Guest Mode. Unfortunately, 15 seconds later, i changes to Home mode, then it changes to Away mode. I feel like this is progress, but I need to figure out why it's not staying in Guest mode

said in Need help figuring out how to delay a reset on reaction:

@gwp1 said in Need help figuring out how to delay a reset on reaction:

@toggledbits gave me very sound advise early on as I was prone to making my rulesets "do too much" in addition to waaaaaay overthinking/overcomplicating things.

Instead of trying to make a ruleset that determines presence AND tries to set mode, just have it determine presence. Have one for your immediate family and one for your guests. Then use the TRUE FALSE state of them in your mode rules. (Saves you countless hours later, too, when you add/remove people from either presence ruleset.)

That is essentially what I'm doing. The "Phones Home" doesn't set the mode, except to reset it. I suppose I could make the reset a separate rule, but I'm not sure how that would solve my problem.

And it's 100% possible I'm overthinking this, or I'm in so deep, that I'm not seeing the obvious. Many of these rules were built on the original Reactor in Vera, before converting to MSR. I had to work with the limitations of Vera at the time, and of course the plug-ins that stopped working quite regularly.

@gwp1 ,
So, the conditions for Away, are essentially the reset of the "Phones Home" rule. If no phones are home, and the conditions for Guest haven't been set, then it's going the "Phones Home" rule becomes false and resets itself.

The Guest mode is met (or supposed to be) when the user code from my home alarm is read for 2 specific user IDs, or I have manually set the mode to Guest from Home Assistant (it's a input select value, the last screen shot in my last post). Unfortunately, this only works properly if someone in the HA companion app users is home to put the mode into Guest.

The Guest mode ends when a HA companion app user arrives back home.

Sorry for the delay in responses. I've been traveling, and it's been difficult to do any of the troubleshooting on my iPad

@toggledbits, it's quite the opposite of what you think. The Phones Home rule I mostly use as a rule state for another rule. That other rule is what put's my Home Assistant and Reactor into Home Mode.

When the "Phones Home" rule becomes true, the "GoTo Home Mode" changes settings in the home that puts for the all the other reactions that may or may not occur, depending on time of day, time of year, etc. When the any of the phones leave the geofenced area, and the "guest mode" isn't set (the last of the 6 triggers in the "Phones Home" rule, it reset's the rule state, which changes the House Mode to Away.

Now, here is the real problem I'm having. As I mentioned in the initial post, I have a guest mode specifically for people that need to come in my home, that don't have the Home Assistant companion app, such as a neighbor that I might need to come over and check on our cats while we're gone, or our house cleaner that comes by once a month. They have a code to the alarm system, and I can tell by the user ID on the panel which user disarmed the system. From there, I want to put the system into Guest mode, so the Phone's Home mode won't reset, and the "Arm Away" rule set's the alarm system to Away, which in turn arms the interior motion sensors, and you can see where it would go badly from there.

So, what is happening, is when one of the guest's tries to disable the system, it rearms a minute or so later. The "GoTo Guest Mode" doesn't have a chance to put the "House Mode" into Guest.

Guest Mode does work, if I'm able to have the "House Mode" set to Home first, then change it to Guest, but this unfortunately requires me to be at home to make this work.

You can see below from Home Assistant, that when I'm away, and I try to manually put the House Mode into Guest, it immediately goes back into Away.

In the Reator logs, you can see the immediate reset.

root@hal:/home/tmorgenthaler/reactor/logs# cat reactor.log.1 | grep Phones
[latest-25139]2025-06-16T13:31:47.275Z Rule:INFO Phones Home (rule-grp19i3lbdi in Phone presence) evaluated; rule state transition from RESET to SET!
[latest-25139]2025-06-16T13:31:47.307Z Rule:INFO Phones Home (rule-grp19i3lbdi in Phone presence) evaluated; rule state transition from SET to RESET!
[latest-25139]2025-06-16T13:31:47.316Z Engine:INFO Enqueueing "Phones Home<RESET>" (rule-grp19i3lbdi:R)
[latest-25139]2025-06-16T13:31:47.318Z Engine:NOTICE Starting reaction Phones Home<RESET> (rule-grp19i3lbdi:R)
[latest-25139]2025-06-16T13:31:47.346Z Engine:INFO Resuming reaction Phones Home<RESET> (rule-grp19i3lbdi:R) from step 1
[latest-25139]2025-06-16T13:31:47.346Z Engine:INFO Phones Home<RESET> all actions completed.

The only thing I can think of is there needs to be some sort of delay for the reset in the "Phones Home" rule, but I'm not sure the best way to approach it.

@gwp1, yeah, I collapsed them because of how I’m having to work on my iPad.

Each of those collapsed rules, are rule states of other rules, which determine the actual presence of the individual users. They are all identical, except for which device they tracking.

These work nearly flawlessly individually. If a user has the companion app, no issue. It’s when I’m trying to “fool” the system for non users into arming into away mode, shutting everything down, and arming the home alarm system to away, that I’m having issues with, if you follow

Good afternoon all,
I believe I’m having an issue with my logic for setting my home modes in MSR, partially based upon Phone modes in Home Assistant. Users in my family have the Home Assistant companion app installed on their phone, and it geofences the users, so once they are within my home circle geographically, it sets a Boolean to home mode. If they are out it it’s away. I also have a couple of other modes, which I struggle to activate, and it causes issues when I have guests, or pet sitters that come over that do no have the companion app.

I have a guest mode that has to be manually set in Home Assistant, that disables the Away mode automation (based on the companion app statuses), until either a user with the companion app arrives home, or a guest arms the alarm system (away arm).

My issue is that I seem to unable to set the system into Guest mode from Home Assistant, because MSR keeps trying to arm the system. I think that I need to have some sort of a delay for the Reset reaction.

In the rules below, each of the users has a separate reaction that evaluates the state of the iPhone. This rule is a giant OR rule that evaluates the state off all them to decide the mode of the house.

Appologizes for the formatting. I’m away from home and doing this on my iPad, so my screenshots can’t display the full rule.

As you can see in the Rule history, it was rapidly resetting every time I tried to put the house into guest mode around 18:00 yesterday. I was on a plane and my mother-in-law arrived to take care of our pets, and I had to log in on my phone to my server and disable MSR to stop the automation in the house completely.

Any suggestions on how I can handle this flapping?

I have another set of rules for users that don’t have the companion app, but is rather based on the user ID for the alarm system and put the house into Guest mode, but I’ve never been able to get this to work completely. It exhibits the same behavior of trying to arm the system immediately.

The only reliable way for me to set the house into Guest mode is to be in at home mode first, then switch to guest mode. I believe this is all linked to this rule in question.

I appreciate the long read and any advice.

@toggledbits,
Well, I took a first step. I tried using the docker-compose.yaml file with podman-compose, but it gave me some issues. I fell back on just using docker-compose, and it worked with only a minor hickup. It told me the version tag was depricated and to remove it to prevent problems in the future, so I did so, and it's running without issue. Rules and reactions are working as before, which is fantastic. Reactor on my old server is stopped/disabled, so one more item crossed off. I'm hoping to have the old server fully decommissioned this weekend.

At some point, I'll go back and try and get it running with Podman, if it's possible. I can engage their community and see if they have any advice, but right now it's more important for me to turn off my office heater going into summer.

The other major advantage is that in theory, I won't have to manually update nodejs each release, which has been kind of a pain lately.

@toggledbits, thanks for the very detailed reply. One of the things I was struggling with understanding was the reference to the user directory in the example docker compose file.

In reality, docker and podman aren’t that different. Podman can use docker images without issue. I’m doing so currently with a Plex image. In fact, I didn’t even have to destroy and recreate the container. All I had to do was take the variables out of the docker container and put it into Podman. Podman will even often run with docker compose files.

And you are right about user privileges. Podman doesn’t need to run things as root. They see it as an advantage.

Another advantage is that you can run multiple containers in the same network space. For instance, I can run Pi-hole and Unbound in the same private IP space, so they can interact with each other, but nothing that I don’t want to.

Back to the subject at hand, I need to copy my extras, config, and storage directories into my user directory, and they’ll stay safe, and I should be able to have my reactor service up and running on the new server, is what I’m hearing. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Good day all,
I'm in the process of trying to shut down my 10 year old Linux home server that served many purposes, but primarily it's what I used for my NAS/Plex Media server. I migrated the NAS aspect of the server in November of last year to a true NAS solution (Ubiquti UNAS Pro), which is rack mount and much more efficient than my old tower, which it's only side benefit was heating my home office during the winter. Unfortunately it also means heating my home office during the summer, which were about to be in full swing.

I have two things running on this 10 year old server at this point. MSR and pi-hole. I'm running Plex Media Server on Fedora Workstation in Podman on mini PC, which is much more energy efficient than my old tower. My next step is to migrate MSR. I know there are images of MSR out there, and creating it is well documented. I'm going to be using Podman instead of Docker for various reasons, but they work very similar. What I don't know, is what I need to do to migrate my existing Bare Metal installation over to a container.

Has anyone done this? Any advice?

@toggledbits,

I tried to go about the way you mentioned, but I don't think it was quite suited for my purpose. The purpose of the rule is to send a notification through Home Assistant to my phone, and I didn't want a delay that I believe your method would have introduced. What I came up with was creating a global variable and a helper rule, that sets the global variable to true when the 300 seconds is exceeded of power being above 3.7.

Then there is a Variable Value check in the Triggers of the Notification rule:

The Reaction resets the Global rule back to false, after the cycle is completed.

It may not be the most elegant method, but it reduces the false positives on my phone when the cycle selector is bumped. For the same reason, I have the reactor uptime checked, because I would get tons of notifications on my phone when I did an update to MSR, or when my server was rebooted. I know I could completely encapsulate the logic within MSR, but the overly simplistic sensor in HAAS serves it's own purpose in HAAS for my dashboard, and HAAS can't read rule states from MSR, so for my purpose, I already have the simple sensor in place, so why reinvent the wheel?

@toggledbits ,
Patrick,
This is what I had come up with. I tried using latch:

The problem I ran into, is the latch condition went true after 5 minutes, and it stayed true all the way until the first condition changed, then it went false. so the "and" of the 3 conditions never becomes true. It's like I need the latch condition to stay true for 5 seconds longer.

I hadn't considered two rules, but I'll see if I can figure out what you mean. The sensor switch I have made within HAAS already is sort of a rule as you described, as it looks for the power to be above 2.9W, which is the minimum value I recorded over a wash cycle, as it pauses within the cycle. The 3.7W value comes from when the control panel is turned on by turning or pumping the cycle selector switch, so what happens is that it does set the sensor to Washing when the control panel is turned on, if you follow.

Any thoughts? I know I can set up a a condition to monitor the power sensor value, and make sure it is above 3.5 for 5 minutes, but the condition I need is for the power value to go to the standby value of under 2.9 after that condition is met. That's what I'm unclear how to do.