How to Turn MQTT Device Events into Useful Home Assistant Automations
A practical way to choose, test, and use MQTT device events in Home Assistant without turning routine network changes into a stream of noisy alerts.
Read more →DeviceShelf Blog
Guides
Practical how-tos around your home network — identify devices, spot intruders, keep an eye on things.
Why Your Router's Device List and a Network Scan Disagree
A practical way to compare a router's client list with a network scan, understand why the counts differ, and build a reliable inventory without guessing.
Read more →Did My NAS Reboot? How to Check Without Guessing
A practical way to distinguish a NAS reboot from a network or service outage, collect useful evidence, and decide what to check next.
Read more →A DHCP Lease Did Not Renew: What to Check Before Changing DNS
When a device does not receive a fresh DHCP lease, separate address assignment from DNS and service problems. This troubleshooting order keeps the evidence clear and avoids changing several network settings at once.
Read more →How to See Every Device on Your Network and Find Its IP Address
Three ways to list every device on your home network with its IP address, MAC address and name: the router's device list, the built-in tools on Mac, Windows and Linux, and a network scanner that does all of it in one pass.
Read more →How to find a device by its MAC address
You have a MAC address from your router list and want to know which device it belongs to. Here is what a MAC can and cannot tell you, how to look up the vendor, and how to get from vendor name to the actual device.
Read more →Who Is on My Wi-Fi? See Every Device and Spot Intruders
A practical walkthrough for seeing every device on your home Wi-Fi, working out what each one is, and telling an intruder from your own randomized-MAC phone. Covers the router list, MAC/OUI vendor lookup, hostnames, what to do if someone really is connected, and why a one-time check isn't enough.
Read more →Self-hosted network monitoring for homelab and office
What self-hosted network monitoring means, and how to run device discovery, uptime checks, and alerts on hardware you own without a cloud dashboard. Covers the tool-agnostic basics, running a monitor 24/7 headless, and keeping the data on your own network.
Read more →How to Secure Your Home Network: A Practical Checklist
A step-by-step checklist for locking down a home or homelab network: router credentials, WPA3, guest networks for IoT, WPS and UPnP, exposed ports, firmware, and spotting unknown devices. Includes the free and tool-agnostic way to do each step.
Read more →Why does my phone show a random MAC address on Wi-Fi?
A rotating, vendor-less MAC address on your network is almost always MAC randomization, a privacy feature in modern phones and laptops. Here is what it does, how to spot it, why it breaks vendor lookup and allow-lists, and how to identify the device anyway.
Read more →Is an open port dangerous? Which ones actually matter
Found open ports after a scan and aren't sure which ones matter? This guide explains what an open port is, which are genuinely risky (Telnet, RDP, SMB, exposed databases), how to check the service behind each with nmap, and how to close or firewall the ones that shouldn't be open.
Read more →How to scan and identify every device on your Windows LAN
The built-in Windows commands, the free GUI scanners, and what each one actually shows you. A practical walk-through from arp -a to full device identification, security checks, and live per-device bandwidth.
Read more →Network scanner for Linux, from the terminal or a GUI
How to scan your LAN on Linux two ways: nmap and arp-scan from the terminal, or a GUI when you'd rather read results than flags. Covers the capture permissions Linux needs and how to run DeviceShelf natively via AppImage, .deb or .rpm.
Read more →How to Find Every IoT Device on Your Network
A practical walkthrough for inventorying the smart plugs, cameras, TVs, speakers and sensors on your LAN. Identify each one by MAC vendor, mDNS/SSDP announcements and open ports, then decide what belongs on a guest VLAN.
Read more →Get notified when a new device joins your Wi-Fi
You want a push notification the moment an unknown device connects to your network. What routers offer out of the box, why randomized MAC addresses complicate things, and how to set up alerts that don't wear you down.
Read more →Run a watchdog that doesn't live in the cloud it watches
The 2025 cloud outages had a side effect people rarely plan for. The dashboards meant to explain the problem were down with it. The case for one small, self-hosted monitor.
Read more →Unknown device on your network? How to identify it, step by step
A device you don't recognize showed up in your Wi-Fi. Here is how to find out what it is (MAC vendor lookup, hostname, open ports, mDNS names) and what to do if it really doesn't belong there.
Read more →Network tips and product updates
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