Hass.io - not as simple as advertised

Configuration
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EDIT: I should preface this by saying that this is in no means an attack at the developers or community, who I have the greatest amount of admiration for. Instead this is the frustrated ramblings of a web designer who’s looking to make his home more automated. I upgraded to a NUC and Hass.io to reduce the amount of time spent rebooting, problem solving and tinkering with my old RPI/venv set up and to spend less time working on my HASS set up - however it’s so far causing problems and I’m looking for some advice of fixes - which are ideally not ‘reinstall everything’!

I’ve been using Home Assistant for around 2 years now, for the last two years on a Raspberry Pi, first through the AIO installer and then through Hasspbian.

After tiring of slow restarts, I’ve upgraded to an Intel NUC and thought it would be a good time to get to grips with Docker, and the Hass.io ecosystem.

Setting up Hass.io and importing my old config was fairly painless, however, anything else that Hass.io is supposed to make simple is a cause of frustration. Am I doing something wrong? I don’t expect my set up is particularly unusual or out of the norm, but it just seems to not work as well as claimed.

Here’s what’s gone wrong so far:

  • DuckDNS add-on: Set up was really quick and easy, using the same domain from my RPI instance and I can access both remotely and locally via the duckdns URL. However, my log is filled with hundreds if not thousands of “SSL Handshake” errors - and this seems to be a common occurrence with no reliable fix.

  • Plex add-on: I used to run plex on my Pi, and it was slow, but worked. Tried to install the add-on through Hassio, it failed a few times and when it eventually worked it could not see my NAS drive that is mounted through fstab. So in the end I had to set up a docker container outside of Hassio to get it to work. Also, when installed through either Hassio or outside of Hassio I can only access the admin through the local IP address without SSL (http only). Is this caused by a faulty DuckDNS set up? I have no idea.

  • Pi-hole: This was something I was keen to add to my new Intel NUC set up, but again, it took ages to set up with Hassio. I ended up following a Youtube video to install through Docker, which told me to disable systemd, delete resolv.conf, and edit NetworkManager.conf. Once I’d done these steps I could then go back into Hass.io and install Pi-Hole. Again, similar story with the access URL - it only loads through an insecure http connection and not https, and only by IP and not the duckdns URL. It also does not block all ads that in-browser blockers get (but I suspect this is a Pi-Hole issue not Hassio).

  • Tautulli - Thought I’d give this add on a go. Install was seamless however when I go through the config setup in Tautulli itself it can’t find the Plex server at the IP address. I tried adding the port number, adding http:// and https:// to the URL, disabling and enabling SSL. None of these work, so it looks like Tautulli can’t run.

And now when I try to add any of the add-ons, the install button goes red for a few seconds and nothing happens.

Are these common issues?

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Not that I have heard. It seems something is wrong with ssl and/or duckdns… You’re not still using the same domain on multiple devices are you? What base_url do you have set? How did you install hass.io?

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Is your system exposed to the Internet on port 443? If so, that’s probably down to the fact that half the planet is scanning and probing your host.

1 Like
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8123 is forwarded to 8123 on my router. Afaik 443 is not open, unless it has been automatically opened by one of the add ins or hassio itself.

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The old device is powered down and not connected to the internet however i will try a different domain entirely as that sounds like a logical step. I installed hassio with the script that installs the hassio supervisor container.

Base url I have tried setting to both include and exclude :8123 and I get the handshake errors with both variants.

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Success! It turns out 443 was forwarded to 8123 on the advice of practically every tutorial and video out there(!) I’ve now changed this to forward from 8123 to 8123, made sure the base_url had 8123 and this is working flawlessly. Still having problems with Tautulli not discovering Plex, but I expect this is due to plex living outside the hass.io docker and not being able to see the SSL certificates.

And I’m still having my log filled with SSL handshake errors!

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That’s probably because it works just as well as 8123, or even better, as you don’t have to specify a port when navigating to your duckdns url - as long as your ISP isn’t blocking that particular port. Lots do.

Picking a port even higher, say 58123 would give you minor security through obscurity too. Lots of Shodan scans for 8123 looking for home assistant servers.