Fibaro Home Center 2 remote access?

I have portforwarding up and running. So I can connect to my HC2 remotely from my iPhone successfully.
But I cannot get it to work in The Home Remote.
At Properties I have filled in:
Type = FghcClient (automatically filled)
HostName: my external IP adress 84.29.xx.xxx
Port: 1002
Username: the email adress to log in to HC2 as usual
Password": my login password for HC2
Version: HC2
Procotol HTTP

In The Home Remote I only see the names of the devices on my Fibaro, but not te value. If I synchronize I get after 20 seconds “please wait” the message “an error occured while sending the request”

Who can help me further ?

Update: when my iPhone is on local network it does not work with current Settings. When I try remotely it DOES work.
At home we use an Android tablet for our home automation, so it is always on the local network.
But I have a iPhone and my wife an Android (Samsung) phone that can be on local network but also remote.
How can we use The Home Remote both ways with 1 set of settings ?
I had the idea to copy the Fibaro HC2 under devices, 1 with local settings and 1 with remote settings but then I have all the devices connected to the HC2 double, that is not a good option…

You could do like this user did for his HomeSeer system. He came up with a pretty clever solution of adding a DNS entry to his home’s router that forces all outgoing traffic to that external address back to the local instance.
https://groups.google.com/g/thehomeremote/c/GsagdV5nFtE/m/GuNAst7YFAAJ

I might be able to add a Alternate Host property to this integration sometime down the road, but my hope was that at some point, Fibaro would provide an “official” method of collecting through the cloud. Much like HomeSeer has with MyHS & Vera has with MIOS remote access. To be honest, they might already have a cloud solution that I’m not aware of.

Thanks again for your reply. that clever solution is out of my league… not that good in networks, routers etc. Could you give me or point me to a step by step description how I can do this ?
I really like The Home Remote, some steps to take and it can replace the Imperihome app that I use for some years. Remote access to HC2 is one of them. My main controllers are Vera but I need HC2 for some zwave devices that don’t work well on Vera.
Then I will gladly buy 2 or 3 licenses and keep on promoting it on the Vera forum :grinning: :smile:

I myself have not done this & it is probably going to be different for every router.

Do you know, does Fibaro have a cloud solution? Can you use their app remotely? They might have a better way of connecting remotely that doesn’t require port forwarding or any changes to your router.

Thanks for promoting the app! I appreciate that!

What router do you have? I have done this on a couple routers so may be able to help depending on the model.

I have a unify router

Yes they have a cloud solution called Fibaro ID. You can acces itvia Id.cloud.fibaro.com
It works remotely via their own app. I think I’ve read somewhere it’s not accessible via other apps??

you need to use a domain name or dyndns and call your url like http://my.dyndns.org:5007 or without the port with a reverse dns and a domain name. try the first solution with dyndns.

Hi thanks for your reaction. What you show is how to set up port forwarding. I did this already successful. So now I can have remote access to my HC2 in The Home Remote by filling in my external IP adress in Settings: 84.29.xx.xxx with the portnumber (1002). But then it does not work anymore when I have local connection.
I don’t have a registration at a dynamic dns server yet. I did some googling. I found some dyndns servers that are free and also supported by my Unify router.
I would like to try this but will it work then in TheHomeRemote also when I have local access (which is most of the time).

If anyone can confirm to have this working I would be very thankful !

What you are looking for is more along the lines of these links:
https://www.fwaggle.org/2018/06/unifi-custom-dns/
https://community.ui.com/questions/USG-static-host-record-in-DNS-forwarder/0b62ff8e-3fea-402a-9153-0df76f2b6de8

This isn’t really about DDNS. All DDNS does is what you’re describing, where you can use your URL instead of having to remember your external IP address (which may change). This is definitely worth doing - plenty of free and paid services.

What you want as well is that when a device on your internal network tries to hit your external URL, instead of getting back from the DNS server your external IP, you want to get your internal IP. It is very possible with Unifi, but my apologies I have not been able to sit down and put together more detailed instructions yet.

I have an EdgeRouter with DNSMasq set up to do this very thing you’re needing, and it works with a very similar concept to the 2 links above. However, I have not looked too closely through those links yet to see if they will exactly meet your needs.

Is it safe to assume you have a Security Gateway?

I can help more once the dust from the holidays settles a bit.

Thanks for your reply! I have a Unify Dream Machine with latest firmware. I would be very happy when you can help me further because this is out of my league… :cry:

Ok no worries. Networking is a different animal for sure.

For now, I’d recommend getting DDNS set up. That is definitely step one. I’ll see if I can put together some instructions for the static DNS entry later today or tomorrow.

I did some reading up on the Dream Machine - I am more familiar with Ubiquiti’s other products (USG, EdgeRouter), and unfortunately I’m not sure the Dream Machine supports what you’ll need to do here. It is a frequent feature request, but the other devices support dnsmasq or the like which allow local hostnames to resolve correctly. I don’t have access to a Dream Machine to look around, so if someone else does, they may be able to help. But what you’re looking for is more advanced DNS configuration.

Now if you really are looking for a project, there are plenty of tutorials on setting up a Raspberry Pi as a DNS server…

if everything is correctly configured you have local and remote access with redirection ports as is the case for me, I find that you do not control your network equipment, it’s Ubiquiti anyway! It takes a minimum of proficiency, I don’t know if here is the place to troubleshoot port forwarding and domain name or Dyndns. I had taken a screenshot of my Unifi backup router but it seems the problem is deeper, I use Mikrotik but I doubt someone here can help me with;) You have to find out how to access from outside to your HC2. When it works, you can access it from the inside, you must not make a loop otherwise you will not succeed (precisely), you have to really take care of the configuration to do this.

Dreamachine or not, this kind of configuration is done on routers that are 15 years old. Dreamachine can do it, as long as your redirects are done! So there is a part to do with DDNS or if you have a domain name you have to go to the control panel of your registar. If you don’t want to see the port on the url and go through the firewalls or corporate proxies, you have to play with https and go through a reverse proxy. It’s more complicated, tried with DDNS and the redirect port in the url. It must work.

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Related to Domodial’s post, and more Googling - https://community.ui.com/questions/Ubiquiti-dream-machine-NAT-loopback-hairpin-issue/8e78ad8e-8831-4b2f-be8c-1b7b38a8d355

Apparently moving the network subnet may help.

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Thanks ! Finally I managed to solve it. Apparently Unify Dream Machine does not support NAT loopback (hairpins), in fact this is a bug. Your last link has lead tot the solution:

  1. Change LAN Gateway/subnet to 192.168.1/23 Now the range is 192.168.0.1 to 192.168.1.254

  2. Change IP adress of the HC2 from 192.168.1.xxx to 192.168.0

  3. Change port forwarding FORWARD-IP same way as 2.

In The Home Remote I entered the external IP adress as HostName and the portnumber

And now it works: I can connect to the HC2 both on local network and remote

@amingle @domodial thanks for you help !!! :grinning: :grinning:

Great! That is surprising about the UDM - but I have to imagine Ubiquiti will add that feature at some point. Glad to hear it’s solved.

For many years I had an Asus router so I thought let’s upgrade to one of the best brands and bought a Unify Dream Machine and two access points.
And then this bug…:grin:

with the new firmware and controller I have no more flow on my AP AC, I was forced to downgrade my equipment to find a balance, I was a fan of this brand but they really do anything in terms of development and it’s wasted hours trying to find out where the problem is with so-called STABLE firmware. Yesterday I ordered a Mikrotik AP and soon I will change everything, I warned ubiquiti that it is not serious. The hardware is the same on a lot of brands, they add functionality with their controller that constantly breaks the pleasure of end users.