We need 2 different installations.
Let’s call it home and summer-house. We can dream, no?
On each site, I was thinking to have an openHAB installation. But my worry is now that each time you move from one site to the other, you’ll have to change settings in your app.
What will be the best approach?
I was thinking of creating the same IP-ranges and IP’s for the servers. This way, when you’re on the other site, your phone will not notice this. Issue is that you’ll not be able to control the summerhouse with the phone app from outside your wifi.
Have 1 installation running as main (fe home), and interconnect the other (summerhouse) with fe mqtt/vpn/… Of course, what about latency then and so on?
On the summerhouse, we must (?) have a running installation cause of zwave stick.
Use a second a app on your phone for the summer house?
But is this possible with the current android app?
Each location has an openhab host defined in DNS for the local zone (e.g. location1.somewhere.com)
Each DNS also has a zone for the other location that forwards to that location’s DNS (e.g. location2.somewhere.com)
So, for example, when I’m in location 1:
Going to http://openhab:8080/ always takes me to the local openHAB instance
Going to http://openhab.location2.somewhere.com/ takes me to the openHAB instance in the other location
I added links to the home screen on my phone, so it’s a single click to take me wherever I need to go. This works fine using Basic UI.
I’m not sure how this would work in the openHAB native phone apps, as I don’t use the apps very often. I think #1 above will work in the Android app, but I don’t know of a way to do #2 with the app.
Yes, Chrome on Android. Also works on our laptops.
I have the Android app, but I rarely use it. I’m pretty sure it will work too, as it just has http://openhab:8080/ in it’s configuration.
I’m curious to hear how others have solved this problem. I’m pretty sure some bridge their two openHABs together using MQTT, as you describe in your scenario #2.
The Android app supports more than one openHAB server now, at least in the beta version. However, the openHAB Cloud Server only supports one per account.
What I personally do for a parallel but not identical situation (I have an instance of OH running at my Dad’s house that I need to be able to monitor, adjust, and sometimes administer).
What I do for this situation is:
Configured OpenVPN on my home systems and exposed OpenVPN to the Internet so remote devices can connect. I use password and certificate based authentication.
Configured the remote Raspberry Pi to automatically connect to the VPN on boot. Once connected that remote OH appears to be on my local network.
Set up the Remote openHAB binding on my local openHAB instance to mirror the Items I care about at my dad’s house.
For “local” access to my dad’s OH instance I go through the myopenhab cloud server. Because of the VPN, openHAB does not appear on my dad’s LAN.
This lets me keep track of those things I need to keep track of and administer the machine and OH instance from home and he has the ability to control the stuff he needs to when he is at home. Notice I don’t really have a “main” OH instance in this case. My dad’s OH instance runs on it’s own with it’s own rules and devices and such. I only mirror a few Items from it to keep track of him (e.g. get an alert if he hasn’t moved in too long during the day) but beyond that his OH instance is independent.
