Multiple hubs on the same LAN?

[CamSoper]

Thinking about getting my teenage son his own SmartThings hub for his room for his birthday. I’m hoping it inspires him to learn a little bit of coding, or, at least, some rules with CoRE.

Is there any reason why 2 hubs couldn’t run on the same LAN? Any fiddly UPnP, ARP, DNS, etc. things that would cause them to conflict? I can’t think of any reason why they couldn’t coexist, but I thought I’d ask the community for a sanity check.

EDIT: To clarify, he’d have his own account and his own devices. No need to share devices across hubs. In fact, I would prefer not to share devices, because I don’t want the security of my garage doors and front door deadbolt to be dependent on his crappy information security hygiene.

[tgauchat (ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)]

With SmartThings … ya never know what quirks my show up; but I’d be optimistic enough to try.

I think the greatest risk is with LAN connected Devices (e.g., Philips Hue Bridge); since “SmartThings’s Super LAN Connect” is going to attempt to add these to both Hubs. Which… might even still work just fine.

[JDRoberts]

@CamSoper

Thinking about getting my teenage son his own SmartThings hub for his room for his birthday. I’m hoping it inspires him to learn a little bit of coding, or, at least, some rules with CoRE.

Is there any reason why 2 hubs couldn’t run on the same LAN? Any fiddly UPnP, ARP, DNS, etc. things that would cause them to conflict? I can’t think of any reason why they couldn’t coexist, but I thought I’d ask the community for a sanity check.

EDIT: To clarify, he’d have his own account and his own devices. No need to share devices across hubs. In fact, I would prefer not to share devices, because I don’t want the security of my garage doors and front door deadbolt to be dependent on his crappy information security hygiene.

We have had members do this in the past successfully, but the problem now, as @tgauchat mentions, is SuperLAN Connect, which will indeed keep adding any LAN – connected devices that it recognizes, such as a Phillips hue bridge, to both accounts. You can delete the devices after they’ve been added, but they will keep reappearing. It’s a big Account management issue in my opinion, such is for those who want to have an Airbnb space or a “mother-in-law” apartment or, as you mentioned, for teens. But at the present time there’s nothing you can do about it unless you also set up a separate ethernet connection.

Warning: new lan discovery feature in 2.3 (thread closed by ST)

All, there is a new “feature” in the latest mobile app version 2.3. It is not stated up front, but this new lan discovery automatically adds all discovered devices without the ability to exclude them. Even after you manually remove something it discovers, simply going back into add a device will add it back in. Why is this an issue? Well, smartthings logs everything immediately and you may not be aware a device it quietly added in the background is now logging all its usage to the cloud without your knowledge. This should be made much more clear to end users and should allow you to add the devices or exclude them, instead they opted to add them all automatically. Just my two cents.

If you only have zwave and zigbee devices, it shouldn’t be an issue.

[CamSoper]

@JDRoberts

We have had members do this in the past successfully, but the problem now, as @tgauchat mentions, is SuperLAN Connect, which will indeed keep adding any LAN – connected devices that it recognizes, such as a Phillips hue bridge, to both accounts.

Cool. I don’t think I have any devices that support that connection method. Even if we did, they’re not a security threat (like deadbolts or garage doors) or a potential safety issue (like my fireplace, which I’ve got controlled by a relay) so we’re good.

Thanks so much!

[Cobra (Andy - United Kingdom)]

Why not put his new hub on a separate vlan
That way there could be no possibility of any interference between hubs