I’ve been struggling for months with a problem where one minute I can use Hello Google to turn on a device and the next minute Google says it says it cannot reach my Home Assistant. There are numerous threads with similar and I feel I’ve been through them all and tried everything and I’m at a loss what to try next.
I’m using the roll-your-own method rather than Nabu Casa It’s a Pi4 with SSD with mainly Zigbee devices. It can sometimes work for days with no problem then have a problem which is usually fairly quickly overcome. There is no discernible pattern - though often when it has failed it might work if I try again within 30 seconds or so - which indicated to me it might be something sleeping and not waking quick enough - but this isn’t consistent in that it doesn’t always behave like that.
So given that it works maybe 70% of the time I am assuming that it is configured correctly. I’m using NGINX reverse proxy and attempting to use local fulfilment, but nothing points to that working properly as far as I can see. I don’t believe it is a DuckDNS problem.
The Pi is hardwired on my local LAN. The Google devices are connected via 5GHz WiFi to my Deco mesh. I have implemented “keep-alive” pings to try to make sure nothing is sleeping. There is no significant lag in my local ping times between devices.
I am in the process of creating a new Home Assistant environment and a new Google Project but other than that I don’t know what to look for in logs, or what else I can do to diagnose the problem - I am out if ideas - so would be grateful for any thoughts on how to move it forward.
From previous posts I understand the problem lies between Google and DuckDNS - more at the Google end. I switched to the Cloudflared addon instead, and have not had any issues since. This does require you to have a domain name though.
Thanks, I’ve also seen posts like that but I am dubious that that is the cause.
However as I already have my own domain it oughtn’t be too much work to set up an extended test so maybe that’s the way forward.
However there must be something in a log somewhere which would assist - either at Google’s end or HA - which would give a better idea of the issue. I have in the past found a Google log with some errors but it didn’t move me on. Maybe I’ll re-find that and post them here.
Just a thought - for anyone who has this working - if you carry out a test in your Google Project Actions Console - test screen - does it always fail with this message?
Thank you very much. I’ve been having some weird issues for awhile and I was about to give up on my Google. Switching away from DuckDNS did in fact fix my issue!
I finished making a new home assistant (new build, new hardware etc) and that intermittently has the same problem.
I’m going to look at Cloudflare. I already have a domain with another provider which I can use, if only I could work out how… Need to find the “how to cloudflare” guide (but thanks for the link)!!! Then I can test it on my new home assistant and migrate my production one across if it seems OK.
