So, I was doing an inventory of the devices connected to my WiFi network, and saw two instances of “Bathroom Speaker”, both listed as “Google Home” devices. I disconnected the only “Bathroom Speaker” I was aware of, and my network now showed one “Bathroom Speaker”. So, I disconnected ALL my Google Home devices and even my Google ChromeCast Audio devices. Nope… still showing one connected “Google Home” device, named, you guessed it: “Bathroom Speaker”.
So next I pulled the power on all my devices with embedded Google products… so my TV, and my Shield… and what the heck, let’s just pull the breaker for the entire home theatre, and shut off all connected devices in the house. And… “Bathroom Speaker” was still there.
I then started shutting off ANYTHING in the house that connected over WiFi, doing a network inventory each time, and eventually I found the culprit! My Sonoff ZBBridge, running Tasmota 9.3.1.2, is actually making two connections to my network!
I took the two MAC addresses it was reporting and put them in macvendors.com, and one shows up as Espressif Inc." which is a maker of ESP32. The router reports manufacturer, model, and OS as empty.
The other MAC address however is more interesting… it reports the vendor as “Hon Hai Precision Ind. Co.,Ltd.”, which is more commonly know as FoxConn. The device reports to the router the manufacturer as “Google Inc.”, and the model as “Google Home”.
This is all the more interesting if you check the MAC address from an actual Google Home. The same manufacturer and model are reported to the router, but the manufacturer reported by macvendors.com for the MAC address is “Google Inc.”, and not “Hon Hai Precision Ind. Co.,Ltd.”
So… I blocked the MAC address of the connection reporting as a “Google Home”, and was surprised to find that not only does the ZBBridge function just fine, it does so without any complaining in the logs.
I will leave it as is for now, but over the weekend I will probably stick a sniffer on the network to see what the device is doing… who is it connecting to, and what traffic is it passing? For now I will leave it.
What I would like to know from you all is if you too have a Sonoff ZBBridge running Tasmota are you also seeing two connections to your network?