Weird thing happened with my Home Assistant, and I’m trying to figure out if it’s just a coincidence or if something’s actually connected here.
Since last night around 8 PM EST, I wasn’t able to access homeassistant.local—it just kept timing out no matter what I tried. I spent hours troubleshooting (restarting the Pi, checking the router, trying different devices, clearing cache, all the usual stuff), but nothing worked. I was ready to give up and reinstall it today.
This afternoon, around 3 PM, I tried again just to see, and suddenly it worked! Naturally, I checked the logs to figure out what might’ve happened. The only thing I noticed was some Alexa-related entries.
Here’s where it gets weird: while Home Assistant was offline, I was still able to control devices through Alexa (which I know is expected behavior). For example, I told Alexa to “turn off the heater,” and it did. Same with some other devices. BUT… after using Alexa to enable/disable devices, my homeassistant.local access randomly came back online.
Is there any way that using Alexa could’ve triggered something to bring Home Assistant back? Or is this just a completely random coincidence?
I’m trying to figure out what happened and how to prevent this kind of issue in the future because going offline for so long is a pain. Has anyone seen anything like this before?
It matters what kind of device and how they are connected to Alexa v. How HA is connected… One may have nothing to do with the other or it may have everything to do with it but you don’t give enough info either way.
Not being able to access the web UI via homeassistant.local, and home assistant being offline could easily be two different things.
It’s difficult to be clear when we use casual language. Multiple technical steps have to work to access the UI from a client in the scenario you describe. mDNS has to be working to resolve the name to an IP address; the IP address has to be accessible via to the client hosting the browser; a web server needs to be functional on the port of the IP address. A failure of any one of these can provide the same failure result from a client perspective. And they all can have separate failure modes for every client (that is to say, how Alexa sees the process can be different than your PC, for example.) as @NathanCu indicates above.
It’s challenging to troubleshoot intermittent failures.
You can eliminate mDNS by using the IP and port, e.g. http://192.168.1.x:8123
You can verify basic network connectivity with ping between host and clients.
You can verify the web server is running on the host with the command netstat -tunlp
Yes, you are right. My storytelling skills also can get in the way. I apologize for overgeneralizing . I did try pinging between host/client, and it was timing out. That is why I used the word offline. I didn’t know about netstat -tunlp, thanks for sharing this one.
Naturally, I checked the logs to figure out what might’ve happened. The only thing I noticed was some Alexa-related entries.