First foray into Automation and I could use some help

Hello everyone, I just want to start by saying that I appreciate any help that you can provide. I have been researching DIY Home Automation for a couple of months, now, and I have finally gotten around to starting my project. I am starting small, so to begin, I have a Pi 3 with a 32GB card that I have flashed HASSbian onto, a Linear HUSBZB-1 USB dongle, and a WNK01-21KIT (2x door sensors and a motion sensor). I decided on Home Assistant and the HUSBZB-1 based on some discussions I read and also took part in on some sites and a subreddit.

In any case, onto my problem. I plugged Pi in last night, first into my switch which sits directly behind my Untangle NG Firewall. I fired it up and gave it a few minutes to boot up; I came back to it and was able to log in after it loaded successfully. I then went over to my downstairs PC, which resides on my wifi subnet, and I tried to ping “hassbian.local”, to which I received no reply. I tried to SSH with PuTTY to “hassbian.local”, and the connection timed out. So, I decided to try and connect the Pi to the wifi router (which to my knowledge shouldn’t matter, since they both talk back to the same DNS); I tried the same steps again, and the ping worked. The Pi responded with a weird IP (it was a 198.xxx.xxx.xxx address), but the SSH did not. I didn’t have much time left to tinker, but I rebooted the Pi and connected it to my TV. I then did an ifconfig, and it suddenly had and IP within my subnet. I then tried to access Home Assistant via “http://hassbian.local:8123” on my PC, but no joy. I connected my phone to wifi and tried there with “http://hassbian.local:8123” as well as substituting with the IP, but again, no joy. I tried from my tablet with the same results.

I am, by no means, a Linux expert, nor am I a networking expert. My network is pretty basic; I have my Untangle box that I use to filter web traffic and stuff (just the free apps), and some basic QoS running behind that. I have my wifi in a subnet behind that.

Can anybody see where I went wrong? It was quite disheartening to already get stuck right after starting :frowning:

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide! And please know that I am not looking for anyone to “do it for me” or anything like that, and then just disappear from the site. I hope to be a helpful contributor myself, some day :slight_smile:

Assign a static IP to your PI and use that to access it. I have never had any troubles connecting and assigning static IPs to all my devices has served me well. Using http://hassbian.local:8123 on this project or other projects that use a .local scheme haven’t been the best for me.

1 Like

Just figure out the IP of your RPi and directly address to it as : http://192.168.1.x:8123
It should work all the time with this method. I do not know why, but I also have sometimes problem when I try with hassbian.local, and never had any trouble with the direct ip address…

1 Like

Thank you both for the tips. I will try and set a static IP on the Pi when I get home, and then access it that way. Quick question about the port number; is it 8123 or 1823? Also, since either connection will talk back to the same DNS server (in this case, my Untangle box), shouldn’t I be able to reach the Pi whether I am connected to my LAN or WLAN?

its 8123, sorry for the typo above.

As for the connection it depends on how you have things setup.

If you use an internal IP to access HA (ie 192.168.1.2) that will work inside your network only. If you type that into your phone (and aren’t connected to your wifi) you won’t get anything.

If you type in your public IP and have port 8123 forwarded to your HA instance it will connect via your phone. However, type the external IP into your computer or a phone connected to Wifi and it may not connect, depends on how your router is setup.

1 Like

Okay, no worries :slight_smile:

For now, I wanted to keep everything internalized. At some point down the line when I get everything working, I do want to set up OpenVPN and use a VPN to connect to to my network externally. But, I can tell that will be a far off experiment for now :stuck_out_tongue:

1 Like

Thanks a lot, that did the trick! I am off to get started!

1 Like