I have recently enforced a better privacy practice for my smart home devices, that includes creating a new access point for those devices and blocking them of internet access with VLAN.
Since then, my yeelight minas celiing lights goes unavailable whenever I physically switch them off and turn them on afterwards.
One really stupid thing is it needs internet access for using LAN control feature. it’s really really dumb.
but at the same time, in this kind of age where everything wants to phone their home, i need to somehow mitigate this in every possible way such as by fooling the devices as if they have access to the internet.
Is this kind of things possible?
thanks!


I understand the benefits of zigbee. However, its regional availability is poor. In my country acquiring zigbee hub(?) without going for sketchy options is not feasible.
Then maybe next time you could buy devices supported by Tasmota
https://templates.blakadder.com/
As for the current yeelights - sorry, no idea
What is a sketchy option?
I just bought a Sonoff Zigbee Dongle Plus E and use ZHA and it works like a charm. No third party cloud based coordinator. I guess you still have to trust the firmware of the dongle, but that is about it.
I simply have not access to zigbee dongle except for on sketchy Chinese websites. I usually buy those kinds of devices from Amazon.
I mean - the ones you can buy from Amazon are the same you buy from Aliexpress, just more expensive. Of course, one could fear that some of them have failed QA or whatever - but I would not have much reason to suspect malicious firmware - and if you do, you can flash your own. You do that anyway if you want to use the dongle as a Zigbee router (instead of coordinator).