Hi Guys,
I have a Raspberry Pi 4 and would like to install HA the catch it is for my brother and I like to do it at my place.
What is your question?
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You can install Home Assistant on your brother’s Pi with some cautions.
- Ignore discoveries. Home Assistant will discover all of your current integrations and devices, but they won’t be at your brothers’ home when he plugs the Raspberry in there.
- Don’t use homeassistant.local:8123 to log in. Your router won’t know your existing Home Assistant installation from his. Use the physical IP address. For example,
http://192.168.1.123:8123
You can change the name of the installation in Settings, General, Name. If you change the name from HomeAssistant to Fred, then you could log on as http://fred.local:8123
(Make sure your brother knows the login and password).
The easiest solution would be to place the RPI at your brothers and setup the Wireguard Addon for maintenance.
At my house I’d set up an openVPN server. I’d use dynamic DNS to make sure I could remotely access my house.
I’d dump the PI and buy and odroid N2+ and use this method to install HA. I’d load the N2 at my house and configure it with openvpn to make a client connection back to my house. The N2+ should be configured to use DHCP to get an address by default. I’d sent the N2+ and a cat 5 cable to my brother and tell him to plug the cat 5 cable between the N2+ and his router and let me know when he plugs in the power. I’d cross my fingers and with a little bit of luck he’ll now have an HA that you can access remotely via SSH and the web interface. If you get this going you could also set the openVPN connection up to give you access to other things at his house, assuming you’re his IT guy.
I did almost exactly this when setting up a RPi for my mum’s HA. I use ‘HA container’ and so my equivalent of your point-2 was to manually ensure that the fixed IP of the device was different to mine.
Worked fine, transferred to mum, did discovery and was up and running quite quickly.
This is precisely why I never use static IP. I have over 100 WiFi clients and keeping track of static IPs would ensure that an error would occur, and two devices get the same IP.
An easier solution would be to change the name of your HomeAssistant in Settings, General. So if you rename Home Assistant to “mum”, the IP would be “mum.local”.
It’s the only fixed IP I have so easy to remember. It’s outside my DHCP server’s address range so I cannot get a conflict there.
I’d love to be able to do that!
Are you running HAOS? I’m running ‘HA container’ (docker) and don’t (think I) have that option. My understanding is that HAOS has an mDNS broadcaster and I’m not educated enough on it to know how to set that up with docker. If you know how to do this this, I’d love to find out.
I wouldn’t know. I only run HAOS. No need for the extra complication of, or an additional opportunity for failure introduced with a container or VM.
Do you have a Settings panel? Is “Advanced Mode” turned on in your profile?
Yes and yes, but you need mDNS to broadcast a name and that exists by default in HAOS only. In docker you need to replicate it using Avahi and I’m not sure how. I fond the documentation to confusing for newcomers.
…but you got me thinking. My Pi’s OS is DietPi (it’s excellent - light-weight Debian) and I’ve just remembered that I gave it a name when installing (was defaulted to ‘dietpi’). I just tried dietpi.local:8123 and it worked so I do have name after all! …just need to rename it to homeassistant now which is easy. Thanks for triggering that thought process!
nope didn’t work. I had forgotten that I had added dietpi to my local hosts file which was redirecting for me (nothing to do with the name of my Pi).
Never mind.