External Connection Refused - Homeassistant and NordVPN Meshnet

Configuration
1

Hi there,

I have recently tried to set up HomeAssistant and NordVPNs meshnet using this guide How to use Home Assistant remotely over Meshnet - Meshnet docs.

Now the set up seemed relatively straight forward, and I can confirm that meshnet is working elsewhere and allowing me to connect to other services on my network remotely - but when I try on homeassistant it just seems to say “ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED”.

Has anyone had success with this before? Is there some setting I need to change within Homeassisant? I have tried with different external URLs in the settings.

1 Like
2

Same here…

3

Hey @js0nbourne, where are you running your Home Assistant from? Docker container? A VM with HAOS? Bare metal?

What happens if you route the traffic with Meshnet first and then use your Home Assistant’s instance IP address, with :8123 port at the end? Same result?

What about you @enr0c?

4

Is there a Way to use meshnet when homeassistant is running on a raspy?

5

for me its working now, but only after i completely started from scratch.
new setup that works:
raspi 4, bookworm, docker and nordvpn…

6

Hello @enr0c and Community✌️
I have a question about the topic of Meshnet and HA. Does it still work properly? I tried setting everything up on my Ubuntu client (Nordvpn Meshnet & Home Assistant via Virtualbox). When I activate Meshnet on my phone and client and enter the URL, my browser can’t find Home Assistant.
Is this due to Virtualbox?
Or another issue?

Thanks for your help.

7

Actually for me its also sometimes after upgrades of my raspi, that connection to meshnet is not immediately possible.

Try to check if meshnet is running via
nordvpn set meshnet on

Afterwards refresh the peers via:
nordvpn meshnet peer refresh

And finally check, if your meshnet devices get listed here:
nordvpn meshnet peer list

I hope that helps…

8

Thanks :pray:, i will try it. :slight_smile:
And give you an update the next days.

9

Hey,

I’ve opened a new topic on this (with a little difference).

Did you achieve to make it work ?

10

hello, managed to get things working from phone over meshnet to a HA vm on ubuntu. Since most of it wasn’t all that obvious thought i post this here. First I enabled routing so that
sudo sysctl net.ipv4.ip_forward
shows = 1 instead of = 0. Will check sometime if really necessary. I followed instructions from youtube ‘How to Setup Home assistant on Ubuntu (supervised) from scratch as virtual machine (KVM)’ to setup a virtual machine. Since nordvpn and meshnet add a lot of rules to iptables i started with them turned off so:
nordvpn set meshnet off
nordvpn disconnect
then added the following rules. Nat is used for the virtual machine. On the virtual machine screen one can find it’s ip address in my case 192.168.122.14
sudo iptables -I FORWARD -o virbr0 -d 192.168.122.14 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 8124 -j DNAT --to 192.168.122.14:8123
These two rules allowed me to access the vm over my local network using http://UbuntuIpAddress:8124
I made these rules permanent using
sudo apt-get install iptables-persistent
the following commands turn on vpn and meshnet and enable access over meshnet from my phone on the meshnet ip and port 8124:
nordvpn connect
nordvpn set meshnet on
nordvpn whitelist add port 8124
nordvpn whitelist add subnet 192.168.1.0/24
nordvpn whitelist add subnet 192.168.122.0/24
nordvpn meshnet peer local allow MyPhoneDevice
Hope this helps