MAC address requirements

[runningman84]

Is the MAC address an important feature for the hue app or Alexa? I think of running bifrost in a k8s cluster where each node would have a different MAC address.

[chrivers]

Hey, sorry for the late reply.

The answer is: It's hard to say with certainty.

Here's what I can tell you:

1. The mac address is used by Bifrost:
2. .. for generating the Bridge ID, and
3. .. for generating the SSL certificate (cert.pem)

Also, if the certificate is regenerated (if Bifrost is reinstalled, or cert.pem is deleted), then most clients (e.g. the Hue app) will fail to connect, and need to be paired again.

So it might be super important, or it might be okay to have it be slightly off. It really depends on the total behavior of all possible clients you connect to Bifrost.

That's why it's hard to say :-)

Now, I don't know k8s in detail, but isn't there some way to bind a specific IP to the pod, or whatever it's called?

[runningman84]

It is possible to bind a pod to a specific node and use the hosts network namespace which would result in static ip / mac address. Normally there would be some kind of overlay network and a pod could run on any node and the ip / mac might change after a pod recreation.

[chrivers]

"bind a pod to a specific pod"

I think you accidentally a word in that sentence? 😏

Well, to answer your original question:

"Is the MAC address an important feature for the hue app or Alexa?"

The answer is "yes".

Regarding the derived question:

"Will Bifrost work, if I keep changing the IP and/or MAC address?"

The answer is "hard to say".

By all means, feel free to try it out, and please let us know how it goes :)

This is unfortunately an area I have no influence over, since I cannot change the features or design of the Hue protocol, while also emulating it faithfully. But I'd be interested to hear what happens if you try that 👍