I have 20+ esp32 and esp8266-based devices in my environment set up to work as dataloggers and displays picking various variables and passing them on to another device… They all work just fine as sensors, but HA continuously sees them as unavailable, because I can’t resolve the “name.local” thing. Only a few of them are used as switches which require inbound interaction. It wasn’t bothering as much, but frequent updates to esphome make it impossible for me to keep up anymore… I have so many failed updates and it’s just annoying. Devices become available at random (usually they do respond to name.local calls shortly after obtaining an IP address, but since dhcp lease is set to 7 days - they don’t come back very ofter and after a day or two they are no longer responding to name calls).
How to make this work? Once and for all? Would shortening dhcp lease be some option here? Isn’t there a way to use a dns server to keep .domain.com names instead of .local thing that clearly doesn’t work for me?
Or is it some wifi problem where some netbios broadcasts (only assuming, coming from Windows world) are blocked and that’s what is the root of my problems?
How would experts handle this?