Initial Home Assistant hosted on Fedora 44

I’m a first time user of Home Assistant but have over 43 in the computer world with a very wide spread background. I have spent the last few days going around in circles with Gemini help on trying to make this setup work.

The server is Fedora 44 and Home Assistant and the Matter-Server are running in containers via systemd invocation. I have tried to work with two devices so far. After a couple of days I finally found out that Rainbird has made their controller a closed system. I may replace it in the future. The second device I’m attempting to get working is the new Honeywell ElitePRO S1200 thermostat. I originally had it connected via first connecting the device to Google Home and then sharing it to Home Assistant. Well we all know how Murphy likes to strike when you are most vulnerable. The thermostat started changing to the standby setpoints at the time it was supposed to change to the wake time schedule just when I got it connected. So I completely undid everything to include shutting down the server applications none of which fixed this issue. I finally found through Gemini that the thermostat automatically went to standby setpoints if it wasn’t detecting anyone present in the house. Not sure what the time period is for that. So after disabling this installer feature and getting the schedules to work again I decided to try again.

I really didn’t want to go through Google Home to integrate the device into Home Assistant. So Gemini has led me to believe that I have to have functioning IPV6 to the matter communications to work. The local network has completely been IPV4 before this. So after working through endless loops of trials I have a dual IP stack where you can no longer add the device to either Google Home or Home Assistant.

So I’m at a fork in the proverbial road. Do I continue the engineering approach “Flat forhead, bald head” and the really excellant engineer will look in the manual, oh no manual in this case, to see if they discovered the right answer. Or do I undo all of the IPV6 changes and have something less functional. As anyone worked anything like the setup I’m attempting?

It has taken a few days of work to implement a dual stack IPv4 and IPv6 configuration on the Fedora 44 hosts. The Orbi mesh router also contributed to making this difficult as it will not pass multicast messages across the WiFi to wired connections so I had to configure a the Home Assistant host as a bridge by using the WiFi interface on that host. Also required installing radvd on that host. In the end I was able to use the Android mobile app to read the QR code from the thermostat and pair it to Home Assistant without using Google Home. This maybe easier in the future as I just read the release notes for Fedora 45 which is scheduled for October 20th will have IPv6 mostly enabled by default.