I am new here and have started my HA project. I had a QNAP NAS and decided that would be the best place to run HA, as a Virtual Machine. The installation and set up was easy and I was impressed.
I have some existing devices;
handful of TP-Link HS100
Techlife-Pro Bulbs
chromecasts on TVs
These run on my Wifi network which is a google wifi mesh network.
The LAN has some devices on it as well, Nvidia Shield etc.
The issues I am facing are that the QNAP and the HA virtual machine are on the Google Wifi network and as the Google Wifi devices are in a mesh set up, there is no bridge between the wifi network and the LAN. This has meant that the HA sees/detects any device on the local LAN but nothing on the Wifi network.
Eager as I was I got hold of a USB Wifi dongle and connected it to the QNAP NAS assuming I could do something that way, but so far my attempts have failed…
The QNAP device will not allow me to create a virtual switch interface for the Wifi Dongle to be used and attached to the HA Virtual machine and I tried setting up the Wifi Dongle by directing it to the HA virtual machine as a local USB device. This may work, but I cannot locate any instructions anywhere that shows me how to set up a Wifi connection on HA (on a recent version).
Any ideas or any pointers would be greatly appreciated.
Hi, the problem is not the WiFi transport, but that your LAN and your WiFi mesh network are on different subnets (try to look at the IP addresses of devices on both networks, the will likely be different subnets). I’m not familiar with Google WiFi router, but you should be able to setup rules to allow the two subnets to see each other.
Out of curiosity, which operating system are you using for your VM?
Thanks for responding. I am aware that there are two different subnets. The issue is that the google wifi is excellent in function but has some obvious limitations. When you use it as a mesh wifi, it cannot be used to bridge the two subnets. I have tried to get around this multiple ways, by trying other methods to bridge the two subnets or add an additional interface on the HA virtual machine that is connected to the Wifi network. I thought it would be easier for me to add the wifi USB device as a device on the HA virtual machine, but although I can do this at the virtual machine level, I am not sure where such config would exist to configure the wifi network etc. I have found a few posts regarding wifi config, however none of them actually show or state how to access these file path via the GUI or via another method.
To answer your question, I was able to download the disk image file and set the Virtual Machine OS to generic. I had to convert the disk image format to img and finally set the Boot firmware from Legacy BIOS to UEFI.