Hi, I have xfinity modem/router and added Orbi mesh on the top for better Wi-Fi signal. Due to the fact that I have many Wi-Fi Iot devices I moved all to the xfinity router to release IP addresses on the Orbi specially that the traffic of these devices is not high but it has to be queued. my HA is connected to the Orbi router with all my PCs and high speed devices. Is there a way that HA see the devices on the xfinity router to be able to control them locally ?
HA use multicast and unicast to discover and autoconfigure a lot of it devices and these packets are not normally routed, so you lose these automatic features and you will have to see if you can configure them manually.
I do not understand why you are trying to free IP addresses.
You could just use a 10.0.0.0/8 network and you should have enough IP addresses on your LAN for the rest of your life.
Initially the Orbi router was chocking when I have everything connected (80+ Devices). It was taking ages for devices to connect and get an IP address. So I moved some iot devices to the Xfinity router and it improved a lot. Xfinity has IP 10.0.0.xxx and Orbi has 192.186.1.xxx. HA can see only one of these not both. The question may look so silly because I am not a network expert.
A router will split a network into two and access between them will be limited to what you portforward.
On top of that the automatic discover function will only work on the split network section where the device is placed, because the discovery function works by sending out a signal to the entire network.
The entire network is here just only the one part.
You should get better network gear or you move your entire selection of IoT over on one network and then only let your other devices on the other network connect to those ports that you open up for HA.
In this setup your other network will actually work as a remote connection.
Thanks for the suggestion, so to be sure I understood correctly. Router one 10.0.0.X should be the router for all IoT, HA is connected to router one and this is the router that is connected to the modem. Router 2 is connected LAN to WAN and has 192.168.1.X. All non IoT devices are connected to router 2.
The question is if I have some devices like a PC with Blue Iris sitting in the 192. range will it be seen by HA ?
I did a stupid successful test but don’t know the consequences. I connected router 1 to router 2 LAN to WAN and at the same time I connected both to a switch. HA was able to see devices on both subnets but I don’t know what can be the problem with this setup
Problem solved. I realized that I was complicating things. The standard setup of modem->router 1->lan->wan->router 2 allows any device to reach the other subnet. The only think is that home assistant does auto discover devices on the other subnet. Entering the IP manually is ok and HA works fine.
The whole reason was to avoid having many devices (80+) connected to one router. Now it is balanced between the two.
Thanks anyway for your input
With a setup like the last devices connected to router 1 should not be able to see devices on router 2 unless NAT and firewall is disabled or you have open ports for each device that have to be accessible.
But if you opened the ports and have entered IPs manually for the devices that are not discovered automatically then it should work fine.