RaspBee II and ConBee III gateways in parallel?

deCONZ General Support
1

Hello!

I am pretty sure that what I have running for a few minutes is not as intended, but here is how I got there and my related question:

I have been using RaspBee II on a Raspberry Pi 2 for many years. Several SD card failures where not too bad because of my regular backups. However, now I got a ConBee III, plugged it to my Synology Diskstation that runs 24/7 anyway and gets put through to a VM, and this seems to run great (and I have automated snapshots, but that is a different story).

As I was lazy and did not want to start all over with 30+ zigbee devices, scenes, and automations on my new ConBee III gateway, I simply restored a RaspBee II backup to my ConBee III. I expected errors, but so far there are none. I see the complete zigbee network from the ConBee III as an exact copy of the same network from my Raspberry Pi 2/RaspBee II. What I did not expect was that these seem(!?) to run in parallel.

No I am just curious to learn from you experts if this can really work in parallel.

I plan to switch off the Raspberry Pi 2/RaspBee II, but maybe there is a use case to keep it running that I am currently not aware of? If I could/should keep it running (until the next SD card fails), is there anything I should pay special attention to?

Anyway, I think that Dresden-Elektronik make great zigbee devices, and I like the support here in the forum, where I always found helpful and kind people. Thank you so much! :heart:

2

Hello, and nope, it can’t work in parallel reliably ^^

You have restored your zigbee network, so it mean both coordinator have same setting, it mean same MAC address, same Key for authentification, and ect …, for all devices there is only 1 coordinator.

So imagine what can happen if a coordinator try to send a different requests than the other coordinator to the same device, for exemple a request confirmation (good on one and missed on second one)
For me it can seem working, because both coordinators can receive the same information, but will be not reliable on long period.

But your experience show a spoofing exploit ^^. If you are able to catch the zigbee setting, you are able to spy it.

Interesting situation, if someone have more informations I m interested too ^^.

The problem with Raspbee is when you have interference, not possible to use extension cable, can be more problematic.

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I have switched off the old gateway (RaspBee II) and am now checking about some differences with the new gateway, which were not obvious to me on first glance. E.g. how to access it with the Android Phoscon app, as it now has another IP from a different private subnet due to deCONZ running in a Home Assistant docker container? But that is already a topic in a separate thread. :wink:

Wishing everybody a good start into a hopefully more peaceful year 2025! :dove::pray::four_leaf_clover:

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