I am new to Hubitat, starting with a new C-8 Pro. I was previously managing my Z-Wave devices from an Ademco alarm panel, but this was quite awkward and limited in capability, thus the move to Hubitat.
I was able to get the hub and all my devices up and programmed locally mostly without issue, and am generally quite pleased with the user interface and automation capabilities. I did run into a few devices where the native drivers didn't bring out essential features, but that is for another topic.
My challenges began in trying to register the hub. The first difficulty was being forced to put a computer on the same subnet as the hub in order to "find" the hub (which wasn't lost in the first place as it had a known IP on a separate subnet), That should not have been necessary, in my opinion, but I did it and was able to get the hub registered. However, when I decided I wanted the hub to be on a different subnet and changed the IP subnet and address of the hub, I could find no way to change the registered IP address. Right or wrong, I thought that de-registering and re-registering the device might be a solution. However, after doing a soft reset to afford another opportunity to register the hub, I am told that this hub is already registered, even though in the account it says that no hubs are registered. Is there a way to resolve this conundrum?
Related to this, is there a more straightforward means of changing registered IP addresses as network topology changes? If not, there definitely should be, along with a means of "finding" a hub using it's known IP address rather than requiring that the enrolling computer be on the same subnet as the hub. While I understand that simple flat networks on a single subnet are the most common case for home systems, I'm sure also that there are many users like me that have seen the need to segment their networks into separate VLAN subnets for scaling, performance, and security reasons.
Hub registration enables some (optional) cloud features but has nothing to do with your IP address. It just associates your hub to your cloud account. It will "check in" with its IP address once in a while and show that information in the My Hubitat portal (just to help if you need it), but this address per set is not "registered." If this isn't updating, chances are your hub doesn't have an Internet connection to reach the cloud (possibly because of your vLANs?). That's fine but will of course cause this information in the cloud to be unable to update.
A soft reset also doesn't remove registration, so the message you saw after that is normal and expected, but it also seems like there isn't a problem--your hub must be registered if it said so.
If you know your hub's IP address, you can skip any "find" and just navigate to that directly. (If you don't, one of the "advanced" methods on that page my still find it.) If you can't access it that way, either you have the wrong IP address or your network is misconfigured (or at least not configured the way you want it to work).
I'm definitely able to navigate to the hub locally and interact with it using the built in WebUI as I have enabled rules to allow this specific communication from computer to hub on the respective VLANs.
The registration issue was resolved by allowing the hub to communicate out on the WAN using port 8883, which it seems is required for registration and/or updates.
Once the registration issue was resolved, I was able to connect to the hub locally using the Android app, but that functionality rather disappointingly just ports out to a browser interface, so there doesn't seem to be much local use benefit in the way of a mobile specific UI there.
It might seem to you that app just ports to a browser interface. But that is incorrect. The app has many features not available outside of the app, including establishing a geofence and pairing devices using a SmartStart QR code.
If you're on iOS, you might find that the latest beta "2.0" app has something more like what you're looking for (coming soon to Android, too, just not there yet...and to general release at some point if you aren't into testing).
I do have one iOS device, an iPad, and will check that out. Other than that, my devices are all Android, so I'll look for updates for that too. Thanks for the heads up!
