First Days Migrating from Wink to Hubitat, Successes, Failures, and Solutions to Help Others…

erktrek · July 14, 2022, 10:36am

HubiNubi:

I do have a question about fees, subscriptions, and cloud / saas services… while setting this up in my firewall I encountered a couple things which raised my eyebrows… One, this device does not play well with NAT across different subnets. Utilizing a computer to set it up with an open hole from another subnet generated page loads of sometimes 45 seconds or more. On the same subnet, 3-4 seconds max. Very odd… but Two, the bigger issue, is I watched this device communicate with multiple external WAN ips, we’ll after registration took place. Some appear to be Amazon web services… being that these external services are obviously paid for by someone for the hosting, does this not present a situation where like Wink, subscriptions and charges could be assessed to pay for those web services some day? Will the device work without these services if they were ever shut down? I haven’t tried blocking outbound traffic to these servers yet to see if it affects the operability of the device and the network but am curious if anyone knows what these external communications are for and whether the device will work normally without them.

Short answer is external communications are hub firmware update checks, nightly maintenance, and NTP checks.. once you get your system setup you could just block the hub from external access - you'll still want LAN access of course. The only issue you might have is time drift so using the community based NTP driver can take care of that..

Consider installing the community Hubitat Package Manager - it allows for easy management/updates of various community apps and drivers.