Hello,
I switched from Smartthings to Home assistant a few months ago.
I’m using the HASSIO supervised installation on a raspberry pi with raspberry PI OS.
I’ve set up the google assistant integration manually, without the home assistant cloud through the official guide It works well, but only 50% of the time for some reasons.
When it fails, it says “Sorry, it looks like home assistant is not available right now”
Is someone else having the same problem?
I’m trying to bisect the problem and trying to see if it’s on my side (internet connection, rPI etc), or if it’s a google issue. Do you know if there some way to check that home assistant is always reachable and if it’s having some downtimes?
Hi, welcome to the community. From my experience the problems from the google side are negligible. And since you have it working 50% of the time, I dont think that there is an issue with configurations in HA. It mostly would be an issue with internet connection. You can try to reach the duckdns address of HA during the time google assistant is showing issues or even try to ping your public ip address. I have seen this error when the HA url is not reachable. Maybe some others will share more insights.
Thanks for the suggestions. I made some investigation and it seems that the home assistant API endpoint used google has very variable response time, and it happens very often that the response time is 10+ seconds (only for an empty unauthorized request).
the ping to the machine is stable at 2ms (to the public IP/public domain).
I then tried to ssh to the RPI (both PC and RPI connected through eth), and I’m getting some weird big delays even when typing something, consistent with the delay of the API.
I’m using a RPI 4b and I’m only running home assistant (with only a couple of small extensions like assistant relay and google drive backup). I’ll try to disable them and clean the config file to see if the situation willimproved
I have seen such delays in ssh when my wifi network is not stable. i dont think that the addons are creating any issue. They work differently. If you are using wifi now, please switch to ethernet and try ssh.
It turned out the problem was most likely the sdcard which was quite old. I bought a new fast sdcard one month ago and from the same day I’ve never had a problem anymore
@m3l7 I am having the exact issue, the past 4-5 days has been very bad, almost every time it fails, however sometimes works without issue!!! Can you please confirm since replacing your SSD you had no issue? I am on SSD.
thanks
With the SSD I got no issues for 4 months until 2-3 days ago. I started to have the issue again, but I’m pretty sure this time was a DNS problem, probably duckdns has some issues. Do you use duckdns?
I’m pretty sure it’s the DNS or some network problem because when it happens the lan address loads and the wan duckdns doesn’t and I couldn’t resolve manually the hostname
I am having the same problem for a couple of months already, if not ever since I added the Google assistant integration. It works 50% of the time and when it doesnt work, the nest speaker that I use to enter voice commands says pretty quickly (within 1 second) that Home assistant currently is unavailable.
Sometimes, I say the exact same voice command right after nest told me HA is unavailable and the voice command works.
I am sure it is not my internet connection, because I am pinging myself from an external source and know my internet is good: had 0.45% average packet loss during the past 10 days.
DuckDNS add-on is running, but it ain’t got much to do - I have almost always the same IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.
Since Google’s answer (“unavailable”) comes so quickly, I think a timeout on the Google side might be set too low. That’s the only thing I can think of.
Or maybe it has to do with my IPv4/IPv6 dual stack on HA. Hard to belive, but maybe Google cannot handle v6.
I have a similar issue in the last couple of months too. About 50% of the time it says “unavailable”. I’m running home assistant on a ssd and rpi, the connection is stable and good.
I was thinking that maybe google has become very strict on the response times of the HA API (which of course does not depend only on network but also on how fast is home assistant to reply to the calls)
Otherwise, I have no idea what is wrong. I might try to clean reinstall home assistant at some point. In the meantime, I’m relying more and more on physical buttons and the phone
I had the same problem. All Casting devices in an unavailable state.
FIx for me was, changing the DNS server on HA host machine to not use the internet provider DNS, but used the local DNS on the modem/router (192.168.0.1)
My AdGuard on Pi4 with Home Assistant makes my internet slow, waiting for DNS. I think this is related to the problem for me, going to switch to 1.1.1.1
Same for me: after months of troubleshooting and long-term testing, it was not AdGuard, it was not DNS in my LAN, it was not DNS caching issues on the Internet. It was DuckDNS DNS servers.
I noticed DuckDNS’ DNS servers were slow and/or unresponsive at times. I found out because it sometimes took long for my HA app on Android to open up.
By querying random Internet DNS servers for the DuckDNS DNS record that I had registered from a random host on the internet, i found that indeed that name was currently unknown. If you don’t happen to have a Linux host on the Internet with the dig tool, this test also works from web pages with DNS tools, e.g. ping.eu.
Turns out the Internet could not reliably resolve my DNS record, which means Google also cannot resolve it. I dug deeper using dig (haha) and found it was actually DuckDNS’ own DNS servers ns[1-9].duckdns.org that were unresponsive at times. Tested with “dig A <mydnsname>.duckdns.org @ns1.duckdns.org”.
I removed my DuckDNS account, DuckDNS add-on in HA, installed DynuDNS add-on and registered a new account with https://www.dynu.com/. Then had to go through all steps of the Google Assistant - Home Assistant documentation to catch all occurences where I had used <mydnsname>.duckdns.org and replaced with my new DNS name.
This was two weeks ago and so far never had Google assistant say “Home Assistant currently is unavailbale” anymore.
Plus, my Android App also became a lot faster, and opens more reliably.