Hello
I just started with Thread and wanted to know if the OpenThread Border Router addon has an option to choose the network interface it binds to? I tried to google this but couldn’t find much sadly.
My setup is as follows:
I use Haos on a Raspberry Pi and my iot devices are on a different vlan with no internet (I open it temporarily to add Matter devices). I added an usb-ethernet adapter to the Raspberry Pi that is only connected to the iot vlan (only ipv6 enabled).
In the configuration of the Matter Server addon, i added the “—primary-interface” directive, which seems to work since I can add “Matter over Wifi” devices to the iot vlan (trough the companion app) and they work in Home Assistant.
Sadly the Border router seems to default to the primary network interface (the logs at startup indicate this) even though I disabled ipv6 on it.
Taking a look at the OTBR AddOn startup script, I don’t see a way for a user to configure/force the OTBR AddOn to use a particular Ethernet interface. Although the raw otbr-agent (the main component of the AddOn) can be run with a user chosen interface (the-B "${backbone_if}" parameter), the AddOn for the most part appears to only allow the primary interface (which it gets from the Supervisor).
From the research I did some time back, the primary interface chosen by the Supervisor is only amongst the IPv4 interfaces. So yeah, unfortunately disabling IPv6 wouldn’t have any affect.
IPv6 do generally not use a primary interface.
The protocol has a way to include an interface id in the address notation.
Primary interfaces do not make sense when interfaces can have many IPv6 addresses.
Using IPv6 addresses alone do not make sense, when many of them is made to change with each reboot.
Using network ids do not make sense when the same network ids can not exist on several ports without it being the same network.
It seems the way I want to run this is (at least currently) not possible.
I will try a different approach then. I will try running the matter server and the border router on a standalone raspberry pi that sits on my iot vlan. That way everything Matter related is on the same vlan and should work as I want it too.
HA is still not a router.
You should move the entire HA installation to the IoT network then and use your router to route the connections from outside that network to it.
It should be quite few then and the router is made for that job.
I just wanted to clarify that my question was not about routing but about choosing where the IP part of my Matter/Thread network sits. Which seems to work as I want with the matter server but not with the border router.
I want this mainly because I want all those devices to be separate and not have internet connectivity all the time.
I will consider moving my home assistant install to the iot network but haven’t done so because of one question:
If my Home assistant is entirely on my IOT network and it has internet connectivity (but internet is blocked for the rest of the network), then does this mean all matter over thread devices have internet through the border router and home assistant?