Is the xiaomi Gateway meant to also be used local only or does it require a permanent connection to any China cloud?
The communication between HA and the xiaomi gateway requires a local network with multicast capabilities. Some cheap access points doesn’t do a good job here. It’s possible to block the internet access for the xiaomi gateway. Blocking is not a feature of the xiaomi gateway. It must be done at your router for example. To enable the “local networking” feature by the mi home app the xiaomi gateway it must be connected to the internet & a xiaomi account for a single time. For pairing new devices you don’t need the app. Just push the button of the gateway three times and the button of the new device once. A restart of HA is needed before the new device shows up.
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Any idea how to block outgoing connections for the Xiaomi gateway? I want to make sure it’s not sending any information outside the network now that I have it integrated with HA.
I use Asus merlin to block access
Use the Xiaomi Mini Router 3 ^^, you can block internet access to any of the connected device. It cost only 25€, and does an awesome job as a device tracker (as well as being a very good router)
I know it’s been a while but this is the most detailed information I saw on the gateway.
Could you explain one more point : If I have the gateway in one VLAN (WiFi) and my HA server in another (wired), this mean I have to allow multicast forwarding in my firewall. This is for the gateway to detect the server ? But once the gateway has found the server, does it change to direct IP connection (and does it accept another VLAN address), or do I need to arp-proxy my server on the WiFi VLAN (which I wouldn’t like…)
The Xiaomi Gateway publishes the current state of the ZigBee devices periodically via multicast. In addition there is a unicast message (gateway ip -> home assistant ip) on each event (if you open a window f.e.). In other words: The gateway requires a multicast/unicast capable network anytime.
Man this comes from a long time ago !
I have installed this, gateway is in a separate VLAN from the HA server. And I forward the multicast requests through the firewall. You’re right, it’s push from the gateway, not poll from the server.
And it works fine, the only thing the gateway can do in my environment is this connection, nothing to the outside world, no “phone home”, no cloud storage…
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