How to limit device tracking to a set of devices, and disable the others?

Configuration
1

I use the Unifi integration which, by default, tracks all devices and creates in known_devices.yaml entries such as

ch1lampebureau:
  hide_if_away: false
  icon:
  mac: 68:C6:3A:A3:10:A6
  name: ch1-lampe-bureau
  picture:
  track: true

This is a lamp and is not likely to escape - similarly to all my connected devices except four phones.

What I would like to achieve is to

  • only have fours device_tracker.xxx entries (one for each phone)
  • not have any others visible (they can be in known_devices.yaml when something new pops-up, but I do not want to associate them to a device_tracker.xxx entity)

Is this possible to set globally?

2

Hm, not sure if globaly possible.What I do is change all entries I don’t want to see from

track: true
to
track: false

and then after restart of homeassistant (container) the devices can be deleted from integration page.

3

I renamed known_devices.yaml and after a restart it was not recreated. I believe that my Unifi AP (which does the tracking) maintains its own database.

There is the possibility to manually disable an entity:

image
image419Ă—521 19.8 KB

but I cannot reasonably do that for my ever-changing network

4

Yeah, I believe I saw in another thread that you were running an older version of HA?

The latest Unifi integration no longer uses known_devices.yaml but instead it stores all the entities in the entity registry.

By default the integration creates a device tracker for every device on your unifi network.

As you see you now have to go into the entity registry UI and disable all of the entities you don’t want to see there.

And what’s more confusing is that those entities aren’t really gone. They are only hidden from the entity UI. if you look at the unifi integration in the integrations list it will show that you still have all of those disabled entities in the system.

For example I’ve disabled all my network devices except about 5 phones. But if you look at the integration summary I show that I have 72 entities:

ex1

And lastly the other not “good thing” (trying to be less negative :wink:) is that if a network device gets removed from your unifi controller and never returns you can’t just go in and delete that one device. In order to get rid of it you have to completely delete the entire integration and then re-add it. Along with the related task of having to go thru all of the entities that had been previously disabled and disable them all over again.

Trust me, I’ve fought this battle with the devs and they aren’t interested in looking into it. It’s a feature, not a bug.

5

No, I run HA in a docker container, with the :latest tag - so I am more up to date than reasonable :slight_smile:

The latest Unifi integration no longer uses known_devices.yaml but instead it stores all the entities in the entity registry.

I noticed that when I renamed known_devices.yaml and did not see it coming back.

In order to get rid of it you have to completely delete the entire integration and then re-add it. Along with the related task of having to go thru all of the entities that had been previously disabled and disable them all over again.

I ended up manually editing the JSON files in .storage

Trust me, I’ve fought this battle with the devs and they aren’t interested in looking into it. It’s a feature, not a bug.

Thanks, I give up then :slightly_frowning_face:

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