How to: Silence your philips hue bridge

Configuration
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If your network houses a philips hue bridge and you protect your network with a firewall (eg ipfire or you have installed a device to protect your privacy (eg PI-Hole) you will detect an enormous amount of attempted connections to “www.ecdinterface.philips.com”.

Over 48 hours the domain mentioned was contacted over 18k times:

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That’s nonsense if you block your bridge anyways. For a specific update you can reverse everything and allow your device once. Then mute it again.

To disable those connection attempts do this:
Get your phue user name with cat phue.conf

phue.conf is found in your .homeassistant directory.

This will output something like this:

{“192.168.10.XXX”: {“username”: “00000000000000000000000000000000”}}

Then send this PUT HTTP Request to your bridge’s API:
curl -H "Accept: application/json" -X PUT --data '{"portalservices":false}' http://192.168.10.5/api/USERNAME/config
Replace USERNAME with the retrieved username of phue.conf without quotation marks.

Be aware that you stop receiving updates.

Side note: If you use hue’s portal services you agree its terms and conditions and its privacy policy.

Sources:

1 Like
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Thanks for the tip. To revert the behavior is as simple as using “true” instead of “false”?

For Windows and MacOS users, curl is available at https://curl.haxx.se/download.html

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@namadori: Yes, to activate just send a PUT request with payload '{"portalservices":true}' .

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I’m pretty sure you could wrap this with a switch in ha using automation and command line call.

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Indeed, good idea! Or even implement an option in the component’s configuration :slight_smile:

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Yes - that too!

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From Windows, this worked for me:

curl -d {\"portalservices\":false} -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X PUT http://192.168.1.2/api/USERNAME/config

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Or use the built in tool
http://hue ip/debug/clip.html

1 Like
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I’ve set portalservices to false, but still get a ton of dns queries to www.ecdinterface.philips.com

Anyone an idea why? Did something change in the new hue software version?

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I feel like it’d just be easier to set up a Pi-hole on your home network.

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@mkimitch You missed the whole point of the post. And the OP clearly shows he has a pihole