I would like to assign a name (ie. h t t p://homeautomation ) instead of 192.168.X.XXX in order to access my Veralite on my home network. Is this possible?
Shawn
Sure… however it might be a little more complex/painful than you would envision.
Vera does not appear to support bonjour (nor is it obvious where you would set the local hostname in case you had more than one). If it did, then http://vera.local would take you right there.
Here are some use cases that may apply to you.
1 machine: hosts files (or lmhosts too if on windows). But this is kludgey and must be done separately on each device. Some devices (tablets/phones) make this vastly more difficult than others. If all you have is a single PC, this is not too bad.
1 network: if whatever is acting as your DNS server (a WAP in my case, and Asus doesn’t support local entries) handles local entries. You can create a static DHCP setting and put in a local hostname. Now if you typed “http://vera” (let’s say) in to your browser, the WAP would resolve “vera” to it’s IP address. Unfortunately, many WAPs don’t support this. You can do this on a system-based DNS server. Getting that setup on a desktop is also rather less-trivial than it sounds (especially since windows desktop OS’s do not include this with the product).
Everywhere: use a cloud-based dynamic dns (there are many). But this also would make it accessible outside the house, which you may not want. Some WAP gateways also may not handle the NAT’ing correctly (since you would be accessing it from the house network, it has to “double NAT” both the source and destination IPs in the packet. YMMV.
Short of the bonjour implementation, if you are lucky and can add DNS entries to your wap, you are set. Otherwise it appears to be more pain than it is worth.
–hal
Bumping this to the top.
It’s normal for devices that use DHCP to send their hostname to the DHCP server, why doesn’t Vera Lite do this?
Can we expect this to be fixed in a future release?
Thanks!