HA as it's own wifi router/AP?

Hardware
1

I’ve been thinking about moving HA from my homelab server to bare metal, I have a micro Dell Optiplex collecting dust, and wonder if there’s any way of running HASS OS on it and making use of the built-in wifi to use it as it’s own router/AP for all my IoT wifi devices?
Any native/HACS support for it?
Or would I have to run a hypervisor and virtualize HA plus another VM for the networking part of it?

2

Hello BangSmash,

Segmented networks are not officially supported within HA.

HA is designed and expects a flat subnet to work as intended.

This is because every segmented network is different for IP’s and number of segments and firewalls and sharing rules and about 650495849085 other things.
This does not mean you can’t use them or that they can’t be made to work, it means that to get them working you are the support structure on your own subnet(s). Consider it Advanced mode…

3

You are better off setting up a VLAN dedicated to IoT devices and having HA on the VLAN and allowing only access to HA out of that VLAN to your main network so that you can manage it either via a port setup on the switch or using 2 network interfaces on the host device.

4

Also keep in mind that most WLAN cards typically found in these devices are client-oriented and either don’t support AP mode at all (e.g. Intel/ 5 GHz) or only in a limited fashion (max. number of connected clients, interface combination, etc.). Also APs these days are usually expected to provide 2.4- and 5 GHz concurrently (at the high-end also 6 GHz), which would require two (three) AP-mode compatible WLAN cards and 4-16 pigtails/ antennas…

…it’s possible, but rarely sensible, even less from an economic point of view. A 20-buck purpose-built plastic AP (optionally with 3rd party firmware, if you are looking for advanced features) will run circles around your intended setup.

This is only looking at it from a hardware/ performance/ pricing point of view, before even considering if haos would be a suitable OS for this use case (spoiler, it’s not).

5

intended use case is for ha to create it’s own wlan for IoT devices for local-only communication. same way as it can be it’s own ‘router’ for zigbee/z-wave etc if you attach appropriate usb dongle. so all it needs is 2.4GHz since most of wifi IoT stuff support only 2.4 anyway. AP mode is not an issue either in my case. many wireless APs in fact have a mini-pcie card on board, this used to be pretty much standard.

6

Exactly that is called AP mode[*], the WLAN card needs to support it (e.g. Intel doesn’t, respectively 2.4 GHz only and in a very limited fashion), you’d need the userspace dæmon to handle it (hostapd or iwd), the host OS (haos) ideally needs the configuration framework to set that up, the host OS (haos) needs some kind of firewalling support (and the orchestration around it, to manage the rules), to apply your policies (what network does what).

As mentioned, it’s possible, but haos doesn’t expose that easily.

–
[*] There are some braindead IoT appliances (power inverters and similar things can be in that camp) that only expose their own AP BSSID, expecting your devices to ‘dial-in’ to their AP.