Home Assistant VM Visible in Router but Cannot Connect to Web Interface

Installation
1

Hi everyone, this is my first post in this forum so please excuse any etiquette mistakes.

I am experiencing a nasty issue when installing Home Assistant. I have it installed using VirtualBox running on Ubuntu Server 22.04, so there is no GUI. I followed this guide to set up the virtual machine in VirtualBox and did not have to make any modifications or otherwise have any installation issues.

The Home Assistant virtual machine is detected by my router as an ethernet client, just like its host machine, and has been assigned its own address. I have made sure to set the address as reserved in my router’s DHCP settings so that it will not change. I can also successfully ping the IP address from another machine, so I know that the Home Assistant OS virtual machine is up and running and is connected to the network. I have also checked through my Pi-Hole and I can see that the Home Assistant is making repeated queries to “checkonline.home-assistant.io”, but I’m not sure what that means.

However, when I try to go to :8123 on my browser, I cannot connect. I cannot connect with “homeassistant” or “homeassistant.local” in place of the IP address. I have been troubleshooting for several hours now and I am just at a loss. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what could be wrong?

2

I know it is an Ubuntu server, but there should be a way to see the VM’s console output anyway.
It will tell you what is happening on the HA host.

3

I’ve had something similar in the past with a VM installation as well as a supervised installation. I never really found the root cause but it was something in my router, and it happened only when the Ha machine was connected via ethernet, if I connected it to the router via wifi it worked. The solution for me was a different provider and router (there were more reasons than Ha to make that switch).
Most likely not helpful but who knows :wink: