One of the advertised points in favor of Hubitat is that it works "local-only". While mostly true I've had to block HE's IP address at my firewall to keep it from trying to access Internet resources as well as block a couple domains with Pi-hole (service.cloud.hubitat.com and acbsahcbczvlj-ats.iot.us-east-2.amazonaws.com). While this accomplishes the isolation I want it still results in a 3 second delay in connecting to HE locally because it waits while it tries the DNS lookups.
I want to see a setting that causes HE to not even think about trying to contact anything on the Internet. Then I will agree 100% that HE is truly a local-only solution.
It is 100% local for execution of code/rules/local devices.. But internet will always be required for integration with cloud devices/services, firmware updates, presence detection, remote app use, etc..
Of course, but if a user doesn't want any of those capabilities then there is no reason to access the Internet, right? I have an analog to the requested switch now via firewall and Pi-hole but it's a relatively cumbersome to achieve it compared to a "No Internet" switch setting. When I wanted to get updates I temporarily dropped my firewall rule and allowed the domains to resolve through Pi-hole. 10 minutes later I put them back.
Presence (noted above) can also be achieved without internet. You can use a zigbee presence device (such as from SmartThings) or check connectivity with your phone to your router (using an app from this community), neither of which needs Internet connection.
I don't understand your post. Are you saying this HAS been made a feature request? If so, when can we expect it? Or were you just being snarky and Hubitat has no intention of doing anything about this?
I agree with the OP- even if we firewall the hub except for short periods nightly/weekly to check for updates, that still doesn't change the constant requests for various Internet endpoints from the hub. My firewall logs are loaded with failed attempts for the hub to connect to an IP, and my PiHole receives 2 requests (A & AAAA) from the hub to resolve "acbsahcbczvlj-ats.iot.us-east-2.amazonaws.com" every 30 seconds on the dot. My pihole does what it's configured to do and forwards each request upstream, but this is a highly unnecessary load put on my network and DNS server(s). And like the OP said- even if we blacklist the domain in pihole, 1) there's no guarantee the domain will not change; and 2) hub is still going to try to resolve, resulting in delays.
I'm sure the staff is very busy, but I don't think this is an outrageous feature request, nor does it deserve sarcasm. And it's not like HE is free and open source and the devs are volunteers, so I think we the end users can fairly request reasonable features. The fact that you have this forum is proof enough that as a company you want end user feedback and community engagement, right? That's the whole point- we're all trying to make this product better in our respective roles.
