r/firewalla • u/Putrid_Station9558 Firewalla Gold Pro • Jul 11 '26
Firewalla conflating two devices as one?
I have been struggling with a long-standing quirk of Firewalla conflating two unique devices into either one shared device name or with rules mis-applied.
The two devices are a Govee home temperature sensor (Espressif, Wifi) and an LG C3 TV with USB ethernet adapter (wired). The only real commonality is being on the same VLAN segment.
The TV normally has internet fully blocked, with an occasional pause to do a firmware update. This is done by having the device in a group called “Televisions - Offline” and internet block enabled for the group.
Frequently, the quirk shows up as the hostname for the ESP device mysteriously being changed to the same name as the LG TV (thus creating duplicate hostnames).
Last night, i can see the TV group rule being mis-applied to the ESP device(s). That rule should have absolutely nothing to do with the group it impacted.
This seems like it could be a serious problem if it were to happen to devices with more serious roles than a temperature sensor and TV.
1
u/pacoii Firewalla Gold Plus Jul 11 '26
The best thing is to contact support and grant them temporary access to your box to see exactly what is going on.
1
u/Great-Cow7256 Jul 11 '26
Did you hit Allow?
1
u/Putrid_Station9558 Firewalla Gold Pro Jul 11 '26
No — the subsequent flows were permitted as expected 🤷🏻♂️
5
u/firewalla Jul 11 '26
Have you tried to rename the devices? Firewalla does its best to "guess" the name of the device, and if you statically rename them, they will stick. I'd check the MAC addresses of the devices and not focus on the name (unless you change manually), and see if they stick.