Can't access homeassistant.local:8123 on mobile (may be TP-Link Deco related)

I currently have HA on VirtualBox on a Windows machine. I can access homeassistant.local:8123 via wifi on the laptop. But although I’m connected to the exact same wifi SSID on my mobile phone I can no longer connect to the same address on that device… Neither via the app or browser. It used to work though and seemingly works for periods of time.

I’ve tried with the IP address for internal URL, but same issue. I can access it via Nabu Casa, but as I am connected to the wifi SSID that I have set in HA companion app it tries to connect locally in the app.

How could it be that I can access the URL via my laptop, but not my phone? And how comes it used to work, but suddenly stopped working?

It may be related to my TP-Link Deco X50 wifi network. The devices connected via the TP-Link Deco integration have started to become unavailable, although usually working for some time every time I restart Home Assistant…

Could you instead try http://192.168.x.xxx.or.whatever.the.local.ip.of.ha:8123
… from the browser of your phone?

I use IP addresses exclusively on my local LAN.

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Can you ping by name or ip address from your phone?

What kind of network setup are you using with VirtualBox? Is Home Assistant actually getting a dedicated IP address from your WiFi AP or router or is it using some shared or proxy setup? If the networking setup with VirtualBox isn’t setup right then homeassistant.local may not be getting registered or associated with the right network in order to be resolved by anything other than the machine running VirtualBox.

If I’m misunderstanding that your laptop and the “Windows machine” are different devices connected to the same WiFi then it may be something with your WiFi setup. I know on my TP-Link APs I’m able to turn on isolation mode which prevents devices from connecting to each other on the same WiFi network.

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I’m not well-acquainted with virtual machines and set up the VirtualBox on my Windows laptop from a tutorial I found. Network settings says it’s atteched to a bridged adapter, Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX200 160MHz. Promiscuous mode: Deny. I suspect that’s where I could change to Allow All? Can’t select Port Forwarding, it’s greyed out.

I have not set a fixed IP for HA’s local network, it’s currently set to automatic in Config/Network. Also network interface is set to DHCP for both IPv4 and IPv6.

Strange thing though is that sometimes homeassistant.local:8123 does work from mobile, but most of the time it’s not.

Not sure if it’s a related issue or separate, but my wifi devices still seem to become unavailable in HA at times. I hade neither of those issues in the first few days after setting up.

And even though it would be good to understand what’s causing these issues I will move HA to a Dell Optiplex soon, possibly using Proxmox (which I also have no previous experience of).

Ah, manually setting the IP address (of the Windows machine, not of the virtual machine running on it) rather than to homeassistant.local now seems to work! That’s how I had it before, but could be that it was before I set address reservation for the PC in the Deco settings.

Hmm, that worked for a short while. Now I can’t access HA from the HA (app or browser) again, even with the local IP address. And it seems to have coincided with the wifi devices becoming unavailable in HA (that I still can access from the Windows laptop where the VirtualBox machine with HA is running).

Did you ever find a good solution?
I suddenly find I’m having the same problem - homeassistant.local isn’t resolving, most, but not all of the time.
I also have a Deco mesh network. Fortunately, I can tell the companion app to use the ip address, (which I’ve reserved in the Deco settings, so that should be a stable solution), but it’s odd that homeassistant.local has become unreliable nevertheless.

I had an Android update, a Deco update, and a HomeAssistant update in the same week, and it started happening after that… :-/

Switching to ip address with https fixed it for me.
You need to “proceed to untrusted site” in advanced when it flags the ssl certificate issue (which is there for duckdns).