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Charly's Column – XMLStarlet

Article from Issue 199/2017
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Charly and XML have never been best friends. However, because it was vital for him to have an excellent climate indoors, he plucked up his courage and considered XMLStarlet.

A few smart home components from the HomeMatic system are permanent guests in my bathroom – they are for controlling the temperature in the room. A radiator thermostat and three sensors detect whether doors and windows are open. I use a central unit called CCU2 to set the climate I want and in which scenario. Their web interface seriously tests my patience. If, for example, I name a window contact Bathroom_Window_North instead of NEQ1651969 – because that's what it's called – I can't rely on the web interface to use the new name in all views (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Window with a poor view: CCU2 cannot remember the name of window sensors.

The issue of security is another low point: The user interface is not password protected by default. I may be able to set one, but because CCU2 does not speak HTTPS, the password would fall into the clutches of the next sniffer anyway. Access to the script engine on port 8181 is also completely insecure. Nevertheless, the benefit is great because it allows me to use HTTP requests to read out the status of HomeMatic components and even set values.

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