HA Yellow and IPv6 with Matter over Wifi

Configuration Matter/Thread
1

Hello everyone,

I currently have the problem that I cannot reach any Matter over WiFi devices via IPv6 on my HA Yellow.

The IPv6 configuration is correct and the routes on the host are also correct. The devices can also be reached from the host via ping6. However, the individual containers do not have IPv6 and a Ping via the device details only gives a check mark on IPv4.

Do you have any idea how I can fix this?

2

My HA Yellow (HAOS) has no problems communicating with Matter over WiFi devices on my home network. I do not even have IPv6 enabled on my home network router for LAN or WAN. I am running a Ubiquiti UniFi network.

Matter controllers + devices will create their own private IPv6 network for communications. As long as your network hardware is not blocking IPv6 traffic, it should work.

Do you have multiple VLANs? Are all of you Matter over WiFi devices on the same VLAN as your HA Yellow? I am using a pretty simple network topology, with pretty much everything on one VLAN.

3

Hey,

thanks for your answer. I also use Unifi and have activated IPv6 for the networks. In fact, the HomeAssistant Yellow and the devices are in different VLANs. However, I have tested the firewall connections > ping6 via Host to Matter Device is working. However using the UI I get the exclamation mark.

mDNS etc. is also set up correctly.

4

Ping will work this scenario, but even if the mDNS discovery packets arrive (note Unifi’s multicast enhancement feature is known to be a problem), Matter’s responses still fail. It seems that the Matter protocol, while designed to work with Thread Border Routers (v1.3+), was not designed to work with standard network routers. Everything needs to be on one VLAN.

The most common workaround I’ve seen is to use a managed Ethernet switch to add tagged interfaces on the NIC to the HA server, allowing it to be on both VLANs at once (“dual homed”). Note this does not make HA an IP router — it does not forward packets, it just has direct-attached routes to both subnets. There was a feature request to add VLAN support to python-matter-server, and it was closed because the Matter protocol as a whole is not designed for segmented networks.

2 Likes
5

Thank you for the hint on the dual homed HA. I was missing the “right” words to google for. With this setup-ed everything no works perfectly.