#Tracking devices with dynamic but known IP

14 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

midnight tulip
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My goal is to be able to reliably track who is home and who isn't, using their android smartphones with the following constraints:

  • Home assistant is not visible outside the home network
  • The home network sometimes reassigns a new local IP address to the smartphones

To this end, I have been using Ping (ICMP) as a device tracker... until a blackout occurred today and one of the smartphones had it's IP reset. I discovered that the companion app supports a wi-fi IP address sensor so I enabled it. However, I do not know how to make Ping target the last known address of the device.

What are my options? Is there a way to update the address of a Ping device? Did I overlook an alternative way to consider someone as not home/unknown when their smartphone is not visible?

midnight tulip
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Some more looking-into I did with the problem:

  • The problem is with a specific device. Other smartphones/computers/the HA device do not have the problem.
  • It seems HA has no way to interface with the particular router model I have.
  • MAC address does not change.
  • The smartphone has a static IP setting. Despite setting it, it is still occasionally assigned a different address.
  • There are two wi-fi networks and the phone is aware of both. I set the same static address with both.
flint nimbus
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Can you set static ip assignments on the router instead?

midnight tulip
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Well, there is a lease time setting...

glossy mountain
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could use an esp32 and espressence detect when phone is near by using BLE beacon instead

midnight tulip
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Meanwhile I found that there is a static per-mac ip setting in my router. I did not look hard enough apparently. Happens. Now I set a few associations and I guess I see in a few days if that works.

glossy mountain
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just keep in mind alot of phones now by default randomly change their mac address for security

midnight tulip
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Yeah I do. I still would like to know if there is a way to make use of the wi-fi sensor.

glossy mountain
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you can turn it off on a per network bassis though. just means you will have to set that setting on the phones and forcing them to the real mac all the time. then you can set a static to that mac

midnight tulip
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So far I found no mac randomization setting on the smartphone.

glossy mountain
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in android you go to the specific network then privicy and you choose "use device mac" instead of "use randomised mac"

#

the setting is specific to the network and not the interface. so you can still have randomised on other netowrks but real at home

midnight tulip
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...never mind! It was randomized. But I guess it works such that it always uses the same mac for the same wi-fi which is why I did not see it changing on the router.

glossy mountain
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it does randomly change sometimes but not sure on the pattern