Last week I installed all my services in a clean desktop PC, running windows 10. I installed Home Assistant on a VM, created my atomations and everything was working pretty great. Than I felt the necessity to access my home assistant outside my home. And i found out this solution: The Easiest Free Way To Do Home Assistant Remote Access! - YouTube
So, i already had a domain name and used it for this. The configuration was pretty straightforward and I endup making everything work locally and remote, both on browser and on mobile app.
This set worked perfectly for a week. Today I was trying to access home assistant and it didn’t work. I checked my server and the VM was running with no problems, and there was no errors logged in there. I tried do access the VM IP address from the windows where the VM is running and nothing happened. Tried to do the same on my PC and mobile app, both locally and being conected to 4G network, and the problem persists. All my automations are not working either. Reboot both VM and Windows where the VM is running, and even rebooted my router and still nothint.
I checked cloudfair if there was some notifications with poasible problems, and no, everything looks normal. Even checked possible problems with memory but no.
I really have no clue what’s going on. Can you guys help me? Thank you!
Yes, I know there are multiple ways. But this was working pretty well before and I did no make any change at all. I am able to ping from Windows to the VM IP address.
I don’t know if the Cloudfare configuration had some impact on this. But it is strange that not even locally I cannot access my home assistant server.
To be able to help you, it can be useful to know how you installed HA.
Your automations don’t work so t me it seems you HA is NOT RUNNING as opposed to what you write here.
I’m not familiar with Virtual Box (have ‘played’ a little with it long time ago): is you Windows firewall not blocking stuff by changing networks from private to public?
Sidenote: I don’t know if you plan to keep HA on your desktop or this is just as a test.
If you go ahead in using HA I would strongly advise you to get a dedicated system for HA instead of virtualizing on top of a desktop OS that needs updating, rebooting, …
In case you have other people living with you and you have stuff that’s controlled with automations which are not working because your desktop is not running for whatever reason.
I can assure you: that will not go down very well.
I already disabled the OS firewall and the problem still happens. And I have already defined the network as private on Windows. As I said before, everything was working pretty great for a week.
The machine that I have this working is an old Asus ROG desktop computer that was formatted to work only as a server. Was configured to auto login and in case of a power shutdown, the desktop auto turns on. I have my plex server, my sonarr and Radarr installed there too. Home assistant Web page informs that this is supposed to work with a VM if you have the amount of resources needed, and I have. I installed team viewer to access the server everywhere. So, this is not intended to be a test… this is already the final solution.
I am saying that the service is working because the machine shows me this:
Is there any test that I can do on the Home Assistant CLI to try to find out what the problem is?
I already used home assistant on other windows computer before, for a long time, and did not have any issues other than the lower resources that the machine had. So, this is why I changed to a better machine and installed everything from scratch.
But this is the first time that I configured the Home Assistant service to be accessible from outside my local network.
To complement with more information, I did a bit more testing.
As I mentioned above, I used the YouTube video to make the cloudflair configurations and included the final tip when the guy says that we can set different host names for other services that are running on the same machine. I added both sonarr and radarr and I can open them pretty fine. The only one that is not accessible is the Home Assistant.
I send you a print screen of the VM window open (you can see the returned IP: 192.168.1.118), the Windows CMD with the successfull ping request and the private browser window with ERR_CONNECTION_RESFUSED error message. My Windows machine has the IP address 192.168.1.103.
Other thing that is important to mention… using other PC on the same network, if I open a browser and insert the 192.168.1.118:8123, I get ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED too. And if I try opening my Sonarr (that is running directlly on the windows machine), using 192.168.1.103:8989, I have access. But if I ping that same IP address on a CMD, the IP is not reachable. You can check this use case on the next print screen:
There are other commands you can run to see what port it’s running on and other information.
ha core info
ha su info
If all those return health status’s and running status’s, the problem is whatever configuration you set up for external access. It’s especially true if you aren’t running a proxy.
