I know what you are thinking, “A triple NAT setup? What are you thinking!?” and I feel the same way, but some things are out of my control. I am working on a Home Assistant setup in my parent’s house, so some things can’t change. I need your help!
I am going to try to explain the network setup, but it’s much easier to visualize it with the diagram I linked below. You can skip the next paragraph if you understand the image below it.
There are two buildings on my parent’s property. One, the shop, where the wired internet comes in from my ISP. There is a router there in the shop, where a directional Wi-Fi antenna is connected to it that enables a connection to another directional Wi-Fi antenna about 100 yards away. They are in bridge mode, so they essentially behave as a very long ethernet cable with much higher latency. At the house, where the connection comes into the basement, is where most of the internet connectivity occurs. The basement is home to a server running Proxmox which hosts (among other things) hassos and an old mini-PC running a pfsense router. A Google Wi-Fi router is connected by cable to the pfsense box, which serves the main Wi-Fi to the whole house (which includes both IOT devices that Home Assistant needs to see along with phones, laptops, etc).
If I had it my way, I would throw out the stupid Google Wi-Fi crap and replace it with a powerful access point, but my parents want to keep those devices. Unfortunately, as far as I know, when the Google Wi-Fi devices are in mesh mode (which they have to be because my parents want the Wi-Fi coverage in certain dead zones around the house), they also HAVE to act as a router. This is very annoying because this makes my home internet setup a triple NAT situation (I am learning this is why you don’t mix professional and consumer gear…).
The problem I am having is that all of the IOT devices sitting behind the Google Wi-Fi are unable to be seen by the Home Assistant box which is sitting on the other side of the NAT. This makes sense from what a router is supposed to do, but makes things very difficult for me.
It is a possibility to remove the pfsense box all together and make the Google Wi-Fi router act as the main router for the whole house, but that would require re-wiring some things between the basement and first floor and I want to see if there is a better solution before going through with that.
Some other solutions I have thought of include the following…
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Port forward every service on the Google Wi-Fi console (not preferred but I’m willing to do it if possible). The main problem I have here is that I have no idea which ports many devices use and that would probably make adding new devices very annoying. I also don’t know if this will even work with certain devices (I’m using a lot of MQTT things, so maybe it’s worth a shot trying just those first). If anybody has tried this before I would love to know how it turned out.
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Create ANOTHER subnet with a new router and access point and only put the Home Assistant server and all the IOT devices on it. I would still have to port forward to get access to the web interface, but it wouldn’t be as bad in that category. It’s also not a very preferred solution simply because that’s more hardware and I would have to move every existing smart home device over to the new network (which would probably take days).
Those solutions are the only things I could think of for the current network setup. Please let me know if you have any other ones. I’m fairly technically inclined, so don’t feel shy to get very technical!
