have running a HA system since last year, now I want to use a second/new one for test purposes within the same local network.
The address to open HA is http://homeassistant.local:8123. But how to deal in case of two running systems at the same time, how to open the “right one”?
I found at system/network an box where I can choose the name of the device. Is this the correct way for getting the correct address?
If yes in a first step I have to change the name of the current HA-device from “home-assistant” to … “home-assistant_1”.
In that case I have to change the address for the current device to:
http://homeassistant_1.local:8123.
Sorry for these stupid questions, but I want to prevent, that my system cannot be reached anymore due to unnecessary changes.
Changing the hostname in your Network settings will change the DNS address you access your instance from, so you could rename it _1 etc. It might take a few minutes or longer to propagate if your DNS is slow for whatever reason.
A better approach though would be to set a static IP either in the IPV4 settings in Home Assistant or on your router/access points and access your instance via its IP when on LAN to avoid relying on DNS.
I’d recommend against underscore as the character is not in RFC952, however minus is. Each HASS instance then broadcasts the name and IPaddress via mDNS / Bonjour as hostname.local. You of course can use an IPv4 or IPv6 address directly.
Great, thank you very much to all: This helps a lot.
In fact my current HA has an static IP. I think will do the same for the new one with a different IP (i.e.192.168.0.253/24) and a new name as described above: home-assistant-test I like it!
