New to openHAB.
Have installed the network binding, and turned on ping / dhcp sensing
gone to inbox and clicked the + button and selected network binding.
Every time, it finds no devices - any ideas??
My nest, sonos, and samsung tv bindings have all found the corresponding devices on the network, so Im slightly lost as to why the network one isnt working.
Is there any particular things I need to check?
Thanks
I think, it is very, very much needed, that Paper UI embeds the bindings readme when clicking on the binding tab and that the addon list is not only a single line list, but a list of cards, with a brief summary / abstract on what the binding does.
This would reduce so much the amount of questions.
Maybe we need another thread like the one you posted previously asking about things to add to the core just for PaperUI. As I’ve been using it more and more to give myself a better background to help new users I have lots and lots of ideas like this for improvements. Some are minor tweaks and others are pretty significant and important.
When you click on the Binding title in Addon List, you are directed to the according documentation.
I know. But it is not obvious to users. And I’m trying to reduce those super simple to catch basic questions.
just wanted to mention that i’m having the same issue. I’ve went through the documentation and ensured everything is configured properly. I’m running oh 2.4 on debian 8.
Adding a Network device “Thing” manually in paper ui works fine and the network binding can properly ping the device, online status works as expected. I’ve just upgraded to 2.4, so not sure if something has changed.
Can anyone else confirm that the network binding is able to discover new devices on the network and add them to the inbox in openhab 2.4?
I enabled debug on the following log items but when I initiate a network scan in paperui I don’t see anything happening. I do see the ping requests to the added network devices each x seconds which works as expected.
log:set TRACE org.openhab.binding.network
log:set TRACE ng.network.internal
any suggestions for further troubleshooting. it’s not really a big issue as I can add them manually, but can check into it further.
Indeed, but often when one needs the docs is when they are configuring the binding. It would be nice to have a link to the docs from there and not just from where one installs the binding. For that matter, a link to the docs from inside the Thing config page would be useful too.
Same problem here, Linux openHABianPi 4.9.80-v7+ #1098 fresh installation, not able to find network devices with network binding.
Adding devices manually everything seems to work fine.
A bug that got introduced in OH 2.4. Please wait for the fix to be merged.
Thank for the reply
Having the same problem. 
I did not encounter this problem in Network Binding 2.3.0
Hi, I’m having this problem in openHAB 2.5.0~M1-1 (Milestone Build). I noticed in the documentation under Discovery it notes that “Auto discovery can be used to scan the local network for pingdevice things by sending a ping to every IP on the network. Some network tools will identify this as a network intruder alarm, therefore automatic background discovery is disabled and a manual scan needs to be issued.” but does not seem to say how to enable automatic background discovery.
Might be misleading in the readme. It is not just “disabled”, it is not implemented (the implementation got removed) to protect the users network. You do not want the network binding to cloak your network periodically.
Just do it manually via the inbox.
Hi David, thanks for getting back to me. I have quite a “busy” home network with various home automation and IoT projects on the go. So adding devices individually doesn’t really work for me, particularly as I may have a number of devices in use temporarily that I just want to check are running. I understand your point regarding problems caused by network scanning but I have run a number of network monitors on the network for lengthy period of time and have never suffered from the issues you mention. I think it would be very useful to have a config option that would allow network scanning. In the meantime I just setup a Zabbix Server to do this. Thanks again, Richard.
But that’s not really how OH works. Even if OH were able to dynamically discover these devices in the background, you’ll still need to create an Item that represents that device in your OH config.
OH is a home automation software, not a network monitoring and status system. To the extent that OH supports this sort of thing, it’s in a home automation context. This means it’s not enough to know that there is a devices on your network. You also need to know what that device represents to your home automation (which is the purpose of the Item) and what does it mean when that device is present or not, which is all the network binding does.
These are not something that OH can do. It can’t know what it means for a specific IP address to be online or offline. You have to manually define that. And if you need to manually define that, what’s the problem with needing to manually imitate the scan for devices it manually creating the Things for the devices?
This is why I don’t think that automatic discovery of network devices in the background is going to actually address your problem. Even if the Network binding supported it, you’d still have manual configuration steps to perform for each device to make the Things meaningful in your home automation context.
Hello Rich, please don’t take this the wrong way but that does seem a rather fixed view. I fully accept your points about defining what an IP does and means to OH and that OH is not a network monitor but it should be a simple matter to PING scan the local LAN and find IPs that respond simply to a PING.
But how do you imagine the network binding to be to satisfy your idea?
Assuming that background discovery is enabled (it’s two lines of code that are commented out at the moment) and you define a scan period of 10 minutes:
What will happen is that the network binding finds all pingable devices and lists them in your inbox. You can’t interact with this “result” in any way except from approving or ignoring those inbox things.
It sounds like you want a script action instead that acts like this pseudo code:
var pingable_devices = find_devices_in_ipv4_subnet("255.255.255.0")
Please also note that “pinging” devices (aka “testing a range of ip addresses”) will not work in IPv6 or huge subnets. You would rather send a Neighbor Solicitation message for known IPv6 addresses or just use a protocol that is tailored to “find” devices like mDNS/bonjour.
And then what?
As David describes, at best it gives you some potential Things in your Inbox. They after not even useable or part of your system until you go in and accept them.
OK, let’s say that someone makes the changes to the core of OH to automatically accept Things in your Inbox. You still can’t do anything with them because their Channels are not linked to any Items yet.
OK, let’s say you have Simple Mode enabled and Items automatically get created for all of your Channels. Now what?
All you have are a bunch of Switch Items. They are not a member of any Groups. Your Rules don’t know anything about them. That won’t appear on your sitemap or HABPanal. For all intents and purposes all you have are some disembodied Switch Items without meaning or function in your home automation.
On the other hand, if you do have a network binding linked Item that is meaningful to your home automation (e.g. I issue an alert to my phone’s when someone attempts to trigger it through OH but the service that does the deed of simulating pressing the button is offline) you will want this device and the Items and Things to be statically defined so you can write Rules and display then on your UIs.
If you wanted to get fancy you could probably create some script that interacts with the OH REST API to accomplish much of this. But it’s always going to require a person to give that Switch a meaning.
So OH is obviously not up to the job then. As I said I’ll use Zabbix.