2022.10: All over the place

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325

Hi all,

After months of changes in HA, a few days ago I’ve decided that it’s time for me to upgrade to the October 2022 home assistant supervised version. As a side note, I am running HA in docker and most of the time offline for security reasons.
Everything went smooth, updated the ad-dons hacs cards, etc. Great experience at the beginning!

Disconnected HA from the internet and after a few hours some issues started to appear.
My synology server along with another NAS server, were no longer available in the media folder. Instead, there was a message on both servers, indicating that my servers (ip address) were not connected on the listing port. Few minutes later, the message changed to DMS not connected.

So I went back to the DLNA integration and removed the servers. Rebooted HA and the servers were no longer automatically detected by home assistant. In addition, I noticed that hacs no longer loaded the cards. So, I started to panic and restarted the internet connection to update the cards from hacs, as I was getting a list of available updates. Hacs will reload the cards but only with an online HA restart.

After the update, went back to the media folder to copy the error message in relation to my servers and to my surprise, the servers were again available to install and configure. After completing the configuration, my shares were back in the media folder. However, turning the internet off again, got me back into the above listed issues.

Did a small investigation and noticed that HA is changing the hosts network settings, via the network manager (linux in my case).

In addition to the above, having HA offline does not provide the best experience, when I need to troubleshoot, reconfigure an integration offline, or using the integrated media manager. This is due to the fact that the icons appear to be cached into the viewing device when connected to internet and not locally in HA. The icons disappear after a reboot. Trying to find an integration without icons, sometime becomes a hassle, since some integrations do not provide a name, or a better visual indicator.

My question are the flowing:

1. Is home assistant no longer promoting an offline experience and is becoming more dependable on  the internet?
2. I am concerned about the security of my personal data and would like to keep it that way. Why is HA changing/redirecting the NAS network connections based of the internet connection? Are now the NAS devices dependable on the internet, to have them integrated in HA?
3. Are there any security audits done on the HA application and integrations, to see if the security is compromised?
4. Is there any chance that the user experience would be improved for the offline usage of home assistant?
5. Hacs is a great tool to update the cards and integrations in HA. Why doesn’t work offline?
6. Aside of having the HA controlled remotely what other aspects of home assistant rely on the internet connections

Thanks for your work your attention and the amazing home assistant application!

326

Did anyone else have their counter helpers stop working after 22.10.4? - they work in 22.10.3-

Message from the logs:
Setup failed for default_config: (DependencyError(…), ‘Could not setup dependencies: counter’)
Unable to set up dependencies of default_config. Setup failed for dependencies: counter

They are set up with the UI and not YAML, If i want to add another counters helper it’s grayed out and cant click it.

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You have to have internet to be able to check if components have an update and also to actually download the update. How do you suggest it works while being offline?

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Well, this used to work offline without the internet. I understand that one will require the internet to update the sources, but I do not believe that one needs to maintain the internet connection at all time, in order to have Home assistant running properly. The integration works fine after the updates. It is not persistent after an HA restart, forcing the user to reconnect the internet. If the host lost power, on restart the sources (cards) are not being loaded unless the internet connection is restored.

I did addressed it with the owner of the integration. The feedback was that there was a requirement to have the internet on at all times. So, the question is why is that?

The updates of the sources should be the user’s decision to when and how the update is done. Blocking HA from working properly is not ok, just because the hacs’s owner wants you to maintain an internet connection all times.

I do care about security and privacy, so I may go back to the manual way!

329

Not sure what you mean here. HACS downloads a card once and installs it. Once it is installed, home assistant loads the card when you access a view containing that card in the UI. It does so from the version HACS downloaded and installed. It does not require the internet at that point.

The rest of your problems smell like DNS issues. If my family let me I will unplug my router from the internet tonight and test.

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330

All over the place, these new BT proxies, but no way to check which device is connected to which proxy (well, unless they’re registered as iBeacons):

To answer: All over the place, but where?

3 Likes
331

Nick,
I can’t post the screenshots because I’m a new here.
Basicaly, I have 112 elements not loaded in Lovelace and the cards listed in the Frontend section are red with the “Not loaded” info at the top of each card.
Even if I turn the internet on at this point the cards are not loading. The only way hacs will load the cards is by restarting HA with the internet on.

332

Im not sure I agree with the DNS being the problem. The DLNA connection is made via the ip at port 5000. and not using the domain name of the server. In my case the routing is done localy not via an external connection. Logicaly, what would be the relevance of the internet in this case?

As far as the DMS media servers working after the installation and stopping afterwards conflicts with the fact that the DLNA devices (media render) works perfectly at all times and the Synology DSM integration does no go down and works fine. I can ping the servers from HA terminal and mount the nfs/samba shares from the same server in the same location.

This worked flawlessly before the update. All I did was to upgrade the sofware.

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This does not make sense at all. HACS does not load the cards. Home assistant loads the resources and the resources at that point are local. I’d wager that you used the hacsfiles alias to point at the card resources instead of using the local alias.

If HACS isn’t loading the hacsfiles alias isn’t created, and therefore home assistant won’t load the cards. So just change your alias to use local alias instead of the hacs alias.

e.g. hacs alias is /hacsfiles/<path...to...js...file>

Instead use the local alias /local/community/<path...to...js...file>

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Petro,

I have the screenshots here, but I can’t upload them. I’ve opened an issue with the owner of the integration, and he confirms my findings.

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Sure, he confirms your findings, but you can be proactive and fix it right now and forever by doing what I said.

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Yes, I know that the cards are stored locally and the alias is /hacsfiles path. I had the local alias setup before and changed/deleted the references, as I wanted to stay away from upgrading the cards manualy. I’ve experienced conflicts with the card tags not being recognised or duplicates errors.

So how does one take advantage of hacs and keep the elemnts local at the same time? Does hacs recognises the local alias and updates the elements afterwards?

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Exactly how I wrote it, the files are already local. All hacs does is ensure that the resource is always up to date when you refresh. Change from hacsfiles to /local/community. Add a ? at the end if you want it to forcefully update the .js files on reload to ensure you’re always running the installed version.

the alias is simply just a string alias. It has no other functions. hacsfiles is an alias for config/www/community and it’s created by hacs. local is an alias for config/www and it’s created by home assistant.

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I understand your instructions and understand what I need to do to have HA load the cards.

But, isn’t this a manual update? How is hacs recognising the version of the card without the hacstag?

I will give it a try. I have about 100 cards that I will need to change, and I hope it will work!

Thanks for your time and advise!

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ha jobs options --ignore-conditions healthy

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No, it’s not. This affects the loading of the resources. Not downloading & installing. HACS downloads and installs the resources and adds the hasfiles alias. Home assistant reads and displays the files. All changing the alias does is changes where home assistant looks to read the files.

Hacs stores this information in it’s own files.

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Petro

I went ahead and changed the path for all the cards as you suggested.

The cards are loading in home assistant, but hacs still shows my cards as not loaded and in red. What is worse now is that when it detects an update and by taking action, it will change the alias back to the way is was before. The updated card gets loaded with the internet on. Turning the internet off that card does not load-up anymore.

What I’ve learned here, is that I still need to provide input and take action for every update that I perform.

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Hacs requires internet. So they will be red unless the developer of hacs decides to remove that limitation.

As for your updating, change your resources to yaml instead of GUI and you won’t have to update the alias every update.

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I can change the resources to yaml, but HA is setup as UI. Where do I reference the yaml file globaly? I’ve used the references before this way, when I had HA in yaml mode. Do I need to change all the dashboards to yaml?

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You need to change the declarations of all dashboards to yaml, but the dashboards themselves can be UI.

1 Like