OT (ish?): British Gas Hive Hub

[Allan]

Just had a hive heating system installed for being able to control the CH & HW from away. So far so good.

The Hive has its own 'hub' (it calls it a 'Nano Hub' on the label on the unit) which plugs into the router (Sky, as it happens, or more accurately, Sagem Fast 2504). On the Sky router admin page, it shows me the devices I have connected e.g. laptop, and webcams, with the device name if available/configured and whether it's connected cabled or wireless.

Most devices show up with their name, e.g. my Samsung Galaxy shows up as 'android-blah' & wireless.

The Hive hub shows up as 'unknown' for device name. Is there any way to hack/configure the Hive hub to advertise a device name rather than 'unknown'. I don't think it's down to the router, it should be configured in the Hive hub itself.

The Hive helpline couldn't shed any light and this matter has been posted on a forum

but I don't suppose it'll get fixed by Hive any time soon.

Any suggestions?

TIA

Allan

[Scion]

Allan put finger to keyboard:

Print "Unknown" on a sticky label and stick it on the Hive hub?

[spuorgelgoog]

You might be able to set up a device name for the Hive in the router's ARP tables, if you can build a static ARP table in the router. Otherwise yes, the Hive should emit a device name.

Owain

[Jethro_uk]

This British Gas, don't forget ...

[Andrew Gabriel]

This is down to the client (Hive in this case) sending the Host Name option with a name filled in in its DHCP request. This use was not originally intended in the DHCP protocol, so it is not universally used.

The Host Name field was originally used by a client to ask the DHCP server what the client's own name is, rather than to tell the DHCP server what the client thinks it's called.

It's possible some routers might also try to use other higher level protocols to discover a client's name.

If you don't have access to configure the format of Hive's DHCP request, you probably can't make a name appear on the DHCP server automatically.

As someone else said, you could set up a static mapping in your DNS server, which might let you name it for convenience.

[Brian Gaff]

Well some internet radios have a menu option where you can alter the name it has using the old move the knob till the char is there then push a button way of making words, so maybe some switchery on this unit allows the same. How else can you put passwords in etc? Brian

[Capitol]

How is this a worthwhile improvement over a thermostat?

[Chris French]

It enables you to check, remotely switch adjust or on off your heating (maybe ?HW as well, can't remember about the Hive).

This may or may not be a useful improvement depending on your lifestyle (regular or varying hours at home), size of your heating bills etc.

so would probably be quite good for us, as home/out patterns are variable and the house is pretty expensive to heat. for my mum it would be a waste of money

[Andrew Gabriel]

I've been switching heating and hot water remotely, and also based on occupancy, since 1999 (actually hot water since 2001). I think this has saved me vastly more money than other commonly applied energy efficiency measures such as installing insulation, for example. It has also made it completely uneconomic to replace a non-condensing boiler in one of the houses I've done, as it uses too little gas for a new condensing boiler to ever pay back (or another way to look at it, it's saved me more than installing a condensing boiler could.

When I did this back at the turn of the century, I remember thinking all homes would be like this in a few years time. Oh, how wrong I was

- 15 years later, and a few people are now just begining to scratch the surface!