Near the end of 2025, I migrated from a Windows VM Home Assistant to installing HAOS bare metal on an old Dell XPS laptop. The trickiest part of the installation was getting the networking up, because the laptop doesn’t have an ethernet port, only internal WiFi.
Sometimes, I get the error message in the title, filling the terminal screen, alternating with “Scan failed! ret -5” When this happens, I can’t reach the system and have to force a reboot (I was happy that good old ctrl-alt-del works here). It had been stable for a few weeks, but has started happening again. When I reboot, any logs that persisted from before the reboot are blank during the outage.
The error message is preceded by “iwlwifi” between incrementing numbers. I think this tells me the problem is coming from the Intel wifi card, but I can’t find the details of it. I’ve seen in these forums that some Intel cards need help with drivers that HA doesn’t set up, but it’s not listed in System|Hardware or in “hardware info” from the command line, and I don’t know where else to look.
I connect remotely using DuckDNS. I had switched to using the integration but recently found that the security certificate wasn’t being renewed automatically, so I disabled it and went back to using the add-on, which is now running cleanly. (That is, I can see in the logs that it checks the certificate at startup and is able to update it as needed.) I thought the WiFi error may have something to do with losing the DuckDNS access, but it’s happened again since fixing that.
My goal is to have a stable system. I hoped that running HAOS would eliminate the layer of nonsense that an old Windows system introduced, but I may need something in between, like Zima OS and docker.
My system: Core 2026.1.3, Supervisor 2026.01.1, Operating System 17.0, Frontend 20260107.2