Hi,

This is a problem common to several pieces of cross-platform software which attempt to use broadcast pings.

If I understand the docs correctly, FreeBSD will interpret 255.255.255.255 as broadcast on the first IP interface with the IFF_BROADCAST flag set -- which I think appears to be the loopback interface (lo0). Whichever it is, it's definitely not my LAN interface!

I think the IP_ONESBCAST socket option might change it to the Linux-y meaning of broadcast on all interfaces.

A quick workaround is to specify the broadcast address of the interface I want to broadcast on (my LAN interface). To do this, I edited:

/usr/local/lib/node_modules/homebridge-harmonyhub/node_modules/harmonyhubjs-discover/lib/ping.js

I changed line 9 from this.address = '255.255.255.255' to this.address = '192.168.50.255', since my network's subnet is 192.168.50.0/24. Other FreeBSD users would need to adjust as necessary.

As I say, this problem is prevalent amongst software which is FreeBSD-compatible in every other way, but is easily worked-around. Not sure if it's possible for ping libraries to check their platform first, but very few seem to!

Hope that helps out some people!