Mosquitto null username

Hi, I tried Home Assistant a few years ago and ended up just going wtih the combo of Node-RED, Mosquitto and ZWaveJSUI. It was working great until the SD card crashed on the PI so I’ve been revisiting how I’m doing things and thought I might give HA a try again. What I’m running into is Mosquitto logs full of stuff like the following:
error: received null username or password for unpwd check
I get into the config and change allow_anoymous to true but it doesn’t seem to do much. I see some buzz about not permitting anonymous? Is there a way around this?

Thanks!