I'm setting up my Hubitat for the first time and it says it's recommended to reserve an IP address for your hub in the DHCP reservation. I'll be fully honest I had no idea what that even was.
Sorry if this is a really dumb question.... but does that mean once I assign one to my hub does that mean all my smart devices should be set to that same Hubitat IP now? Is that how it works?
so from your web browser on a pc, log into your router (likely provided by your internet provider). Once there go to network settings, then DHCP (aka dynamic host control protocol. AKA it issues an ip address to your devices).
Once in there pick an IP address in your scope (it should show your scope of numbers in the DHCP server) Match that ip with the MAC address on your hub (printed on the bottom).
Now whenever the hub boots it will always have that same IP address.
It should be an option on your router. Depending on what brand of router it is, they may call it something else, like IP binding for example.
Basically you are setting a fixed IP for that device at the router level so every time the hub connects it always gets assigned the same IP.
Any other Wifi smart devices you have would not need to be changed or impacted, although you may want to set those to reserved IPs as well if you will be doing a local integration with Hubitat.
For a little more background, what this does is ensure you always have the same IP address to find your hub.
The DHCP reservation on your router means you can always find your hub with the same IP address, and also ensures any integrations that use your hub's IP address will always be able to find it.
Ok I have found exactly where I can assign it to the hub.
Yes, my goal is to then start the journey on automations here.
Lastly, is it one reserved IP address per smart device or would they all share the reserved one I gave to Hubitat?
Every device needs to have a unique IP on the LAN.
Depending on what kinds of IP based smart devices you have, you may not even need to give them assigned IPs. If they can only work via cloud integrations for example, the IP does not really matter. Some people give everything assigned IPs but myself personally I only do when I need to for some reason.
For a device which is on all the time like your hub, it is likely it's address lease will be renewed the same every time for a very long time. A Lease attempts to renew at 1/2 lease duration but that lease will not be reassigned until the lease duration expires. If your Hub were to not communicate with the DHCP server past the lease expiration time it may very well be assigned a different address when it next sent a lease request. A reservation prevents the DHCP server from releasing the reserved address back into the pool.
Download the Hubitat app
