HomeAssistant and networking on RPi - rabbit hole

Installation
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1

Rabbit holes, rabbit holes everywhere :slight_smile:

I want to set up HomeAssistant on RPi 5 with internet access on one network interface and management access on another. I am not new to Linux or basic/intermediate networking but in the last few days the more I try the deeper rabbit holes get…

Network set up:

  • I have one local network (LAN+WiFi) with internet access which I am using for all devices. I can set up the IP addresses, DHCP server etc.

  • I have another “Guest” network (WiFi only) with internet access but I have no control of IP address assignment, open ports etc. Any device connected to this network is not visible to any other device, even ones connected to the same network. Also, it uses DHCP and adress pool and default gateway change every day or so (secure I guess, but annoying) Hence I cannot access HomeAssistant dashboard through IP:port

  • I could set up another router with WiFi and LAN but without internet access, at the moment i do not want to do that

The project:
I would like to run HomeAssistant to manage ~10 Zigbee devices and sensors without giving them internet access, and run AdGuard for the rest of my local network. Simplest way for that is HomeAssistantOS because I can install add-ons, including AdGuard. Problem with that is I do not see how to use RPi Wifi and LAN at the same time with HomeAssistantOS. RPiOS does this out of the box, I don’t even have do modify default routes.

Progress so far:
Minimal :slight_smile:
Docker does not look like suitable solution, HomeAssistantOS addons cannot be easily installed in that case. I am considering proxmox with one RPiOS and one HomeAssistantOS VM, but it looks like too much overhead for what I want and proxmox is slightly PITA to install on RPi.

Any ideas or pointers to instructions is appreciated!

2

Zigbee devices never have internet access. Zigbee is a network of its own, with no routing to Internet.
So if that’s your sole goal, you are giving yourself headaches for nothing :wink:

2 Likes
3

Yup, you are probably right.

On the other hand, I will likely add other things to this setup and HAOS does not have a firewall, so setting up a reasonably secure system from the start is preferred, see for instance Local firewall on Home Assistant? - #2 by agners

4

General firewalling is to be done at your edge router, not on every single device on your network.
What are you afraid of from inside you LAN, exactly, above application level security built in HA?

5

Consider this… The enterprise smart home syndrome