Recently a lot of people lost a lot of precious data after a security issue with QNAP NAS.
This made me revisit my own security level both with my Synology NAS and other 3rd party boxes
So I started a long weekend project defining better password strategy and in some cases created specific users for Home Assistant. There are integrations where you need some level of Admin access for the integration to work but in many cases you can create an “almost” admin user that has just the privviledges needed for the job.
In other words I had to redefine both user names and passwords for many of my integrations.
Even without a major cleanup, changing your passwords periodically is a good idea. It is not unreasonable to expect that you want to change the part of configuration that relates to credentials. Both usernames and passwords.
I have also recently moved one of my 3rd party boxes to another computer and that created a need to change the IP address of the server
Many of you integration developers moved your configs from YAML to UI. That is a good thing! Much more user friendly. But most of you forgot to make the settings you do at initial installation available for editing later
Most integrations do not allow to change simple things like the host name or IP, port number, user name, and password.
The only UI way to do that is to remove the entire integration and add it again. And for some integrations that can mean losing some of the renaming of entities and other things that you may have done post installation via the UI. That should be a last resort.
Some integrations are small and only create 1 device and 1 entity and they are not too much a pain. But those that create multiple entities, in some cases hundreds, this is a major pain.
There is one exception in all my integrations. MQTT. The author deserves a medal. There is a nice configuration menu at the top of the configuration saying re-configure MQTT. Super well made.
It is my hope that some of you will have this in mind next time you put time in updating your integration.
For those users that read this.
There is a way. It is risky but the only way currently.
Stop HA.
Go to the config/.storage directory and take a safety copy of core.config:entries
Edit the file and replace the settings you want to change. Search for your old IP address or password and change them. Do not goof up the quotes. Do not add extra commas. Be sober when you do this.
And then start HA again
Horrible risky hack but currently the only way if you do not want to completely remove the integrations