Hue emulation: Troubleshooting - which solution is best for openhabian

Add-ons Bindings
1

Hi,
I am using openHABian on a Raspi 2B model.
Hue emulation in combination with Alexa on an Echo Dot let me switch several wall plugs until maybe September. Then it stopped working. I read about updates to the echo dots and the upcoming update to openHAB v2.5 and decided to “sit it out”.
Now I updated my openHABian to v2.5 a couple of weeks age and still the hue emulation does not work.
Now it is time to change that.
Reading through the Documentation on the “Add-ons-Integration-HueEmultaion” page (openHAB Hue Emulation - System Integrations | openHAB) shows that the problem is addressed under the section “Troubleshooting”.

Now there are 3 options given and my question is:
Which option is to be prefered for the openHABian setup and me being a linux “copy & paste” user, not really understanding all of what I am doing there.

For me the easiest way seems to be the

port forward your openHAB installation to port 80, ( iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 8080 )

method (did I mention I am a copy & paste user :slight_smile: ).

I suppose I just paste it into the Raspi command line (probably with sudo up front) and it is all set!?

I am willing to try, but as I am not familiar with what I would be doing, the question is, if it would not work out for me, how do I undo this? (I would love a “copy & paste” answer :smiley:)

Thanks for help on this.

Great work and thanks a lot to the “makers/maintainers/supporter” of openHAB - you are doing a fantastic job!!! :+1:

Greetings
Eckart

2

To undo the iptables rule just reboot. The rule is not persistent when you only execute the rule in the command line.

3

Hi Matthy,

thanks fro the quick reply.
I entered “sudo iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 8080” on the openhabian-Raspi.
Then a first try with Hue emulation pariing activated through PaperUI did not work,
but with the “openhabianpi:8080/api/status” page und turning on the pairing on that page - it did work!

Do I understand it correctly: After a reboot the changes will be gone, but the paired devices will persist as it is only needed for the pairing itself.
Before a new hue emulation pairing, I just do it again? That`s easy enough, just something to remember!

Thanks a lot!

Best regards
Eckart

4

I think it’s not only needed for pairing. You have to reapply the rule after reboot.
You can do this automatically with the Debian package iptables-persistent:

apt-get install iptables-persistent

5

Hi Matthy,

I installed as suggested, rebooted and it seems to work!
Thanks for your help!

Eckart