Adding integrations via UI, IP Address Preferred?

Configuration
1

I’ve recently set up home assistant almost from scratch on an intel NUC with a USB Z-Wave adapter. Everything went surprisingly smooth to be honest, and I couldn’t be happier of having abandoned my old Vera Plus controller.

This was also the first time that I’ve “extensively” used the ability to add integrations via the user interface. Which I have to say is quite simple and pleasant to do. However, after losing and having to re-create my DHCP&DNS server yesterday, I was horrified to see that most of my IP-based integrations had stopped working because the IP Addresses had changed.

After reading around I located core.config_entries and after stopping the core I modified the relevant “host” entries and now everything works again. While I was at it I entered the FQDN of the relevant devices and was left wondering why Home Assistant wouldn’t do this from the begging?

I’m a bit late for calling it “What the Heck”, but what’s the general feeling? Do people genuinely prefer messing around with IP’s instead of DNS Addresses? And is it just me or is it a bit annoying to have to delete and add an integration anew to change the device’s address?

Ps.: After starting home assistant again I noticed that some integrations continued to work happily with the FQDN Address. Other entries immediately got updated back to the IP Address. So I guess each integration does it differently.

Note: I’m genuinely not trying to flame or troll and I’m a big fan of Home Assistant. But I’m curious about the mindset about network addressing here in the community.

What’s your preferred naming/addressing approach for devices in your network?
  • FQDN/DNS Names all the way
  • IP Address is king
  • If I could I would use Mac Adresses

0 voters

2

I think it boils down to the integrations you use. With over 100 WiFi (Tasmota) devices, it takes a lot of work to setup a DNS for them, and they register their selves anyway to the mosquitto broker. And my 2 pi-holes have a fail-over script, dhcp reservations are preserved when one of them fails. And for the rest, I don’t have much integration that need either an ip-address or FQDN.

oh, if I could I would use Mac Addresses : that is the way to setup dhcp reservations :slight_smile: