Home Assistant CLI not starting - Probable DNS Issue

Installation
1

Hello,

I’ve HAOS installed on VirtualBox/Linux, running 24.8.x version. Last night I updated OpnSense firewall which was few versions behind.
It seems when/after I reached version 24.1.5 version in Opnsense, I lost connection with HA.

I restarted HA from the Virtualbox console and it is stuck at Home Assistant CLI not starting.

I looked at all thread I could find in search, tried “login” it doesn’t help.
Opnsense is using unbound DNS set to 1.1.1.1
HA was configured to use DHCP provided by opnsense with a reserved address in DHCP. I can ping HA ip address but cannot login to anything on it.

Clearly it’s after the firewall update it stopped working but can’t figure out what is not working.
Any ideas?

Thanks

2

To test, if your firewall is involved you can simply unable the firewall…

If the problem remains:
Before you go one you must now that the console output is far behind the servers real state.
So I often get the “warning” CLI is not ready. This means console is up but not the server.
Here you need to wait. You can type “banner” to refresh or “login”.

So, depending on your machine wait a few time. If it still remains unaccessable you one can dive deeper.
But if you can ping HAOS means it is only, even if your frontend is not…
To exclude more, if you have the console output but no running services, it is not an external problem.

3

Not a firewall issue, I let most traffic go through.
Indeed I couldn’t access much from the console except part of the network info. It seemed HA couldn’t resolve anything and “own” itself the allocated ip from DHCP.
Waiting was not helping.

Anyway I ended up recreating a new VM, loaded an old backup, reassigned the ip to the new Mac address in DHCP and it started without any issue.

Only downside is I will never know what happened and why the old VM is not starting. But it takes max 30 minutes to reconfigure a new HA on VM, so not worth wasting more than 3 hours to figure out what was the issue.

4

It always seems like VirtualBox is feast or famine - when it works it works, but when it doesn’t it’s a mess of strange issues that you wouldn’t suspect VB for initially.