I've scoured the internet and can't find what I feel is a conclusion on whether or not the apple home kit thread border router must be on the same lan as HA or if it can still work both as a border router and, say for example, an apple TV at the same time. Can anyone here clarify for me? Thanks in advance. For context, my internet of things is quite large and I'm considering moving them over to a vlan. There's some discussions in HA forums and reddit about this type of thing but it's not at all clear to me if thread border routers will work both as an apple tv and as a border router if it's on the device vlan (in my mind this vlan would have no internet access) or the main network (the one with internet access). I'm using HA Yellow.
#apple home kit thread border routers on vlan
sage thistle
hidden mica
there's nothing apple specific about this, it's general to thread border routers. Home assistant must be able to receive ipv6 router annoucements from the thread border router, and must be able to make mdns queries which get answered by the thread border router. in general, both of those things will only work if HA and the TBR are on the same vlan.
and you will lose a lot of the apple tv functionality without internet, of course.
sage thistle
there's nothing apple specific about this, it's general to thread border routers...
To make sure I understand, HA and thread border routers on main lan, devices on vlan of devices. Correct?
hidden mica
whether that will work depends on what your other devices are. HA still needs to be able to talk to them, and they might depend on various discovery methods like mdns, broadcast/multicast, etc...
sage thistle
Ok. So I’m no farther along in my understanding. Can you tell me what questions I need to know the answers to? Most of my devices are matter using WiFi. Many are matter over thread. No Zigbee. A couple of z wave devices.
Others are simply WiFi and three or so are tasmoto.
hidden mica
if you're using a mix of matter over thread, matter over wifi and other wifi devices, then I strongly recommend placing ha, the thread border router, and the wifi devices all on one vlan. you're just gonna be hunting reliability/discovery issues due to network communication problems any other way
that does mean that it will have to be a vlan with internet access for some of your devices to work