Network Issues - Can Reach Observer, but Not Home Assistant

[SomeGuy5468]

I’m completely new to Home Assistant and desperately trying to get off of Samsung SmartThings. I’ve scrounged an Intel NUC, installed Home Assistant Operating System by flashing haos_generic-x86-64-10.5 to the SSD with Etcher. I’ve hooked up the NUC to ethernet and booted, but I can’t seem to connect to homeassistant.local:8123.

Curiously, I can access Home Assistant Observer on http://homeassistant.local:4357/ and receive messages of Connected, Supported, and Healthy.

When I attempt to connect to Home Assistant at http://homeassistant.local:8123/, I receive a ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED response. I’ve tried both Chrome and Safari, and both provide the same results. Can someone please help me understand what’s going on?

Thanks.

[BebeMischa]

try IPADRESS:8123

[SomeGuy5468]

Same result. I can get to Observer with IPADDRESS:4357, but I get ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED when I try to go to IPADDRESS:8123.

[stevemann (Stephen Mann (YAML-challenged))]

What is the IP address of the Home Assistant server?
What is the IP address of the PC?

From a PC on the same network, open a cmd line and enter:
ping homeassistant.local /4
This should respond with the IP address for homeassistant.local.

Alternately,

Do you have a display plugged into the NUC? If so, it should give you the IP address. Mine, for example is 192.168.1.70, so to go into Home Assistant, I can enter http://192.168.1.70 or http://homeassistant.local
(Both are identical).

Tell us what the responses to the pings are and what do you see on the display on the NUC.

[SomeGuy5468]

Pinging homeassistant.local returns unknown host.

➜  ~ ping homeassistant.local   
ping: cannot resolve homeassistant.local: Unknown host

This seems strange to me given that navigating to http://homeassistant.local:4357 in Chrome on the same computer successfully loads Home Assistant Observer.

Here is the display on the NUC:

I find it curious that the NUC seems to get an IPv6 address, but not an IPv4. I decided to try navigating to http://[fd6e:7763:6711::862]:4357 in Chrome and received the same Home Assistant Observer status of Connected, Supported, and Healthy. Trying to navigate to http://[fd6e:7763:6711::862]:8123, however, still gives me the same ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED.

I poked around at the ha > prompt a bit and found the command supervisor logs, and this returned a bunch of messages repeatedly stating:

WARNING (MainThread) [supervisor.jobs] 'Updater.fetch_data' blocked from execution, no supervisor internet connection
WARNING (MainThread) [supervisor.homeassistant.core] Error on Home Assistant installation. Retry in 30sec

[SomeGuy5468]

Oh, also, not too surprising, but a ping6 fd6e:7763:6711::862 works fine.

➜ ~ ping6 fd6e:7763:6711::862
PING6(56=40+8+8 bytes) fd6e:7763:6711:0:cb:82fe:f55d:3a5b --> fd6e:7763:6711::862
16 bytes from fd6e:7763:6711::862, icmp_seq=0 hlim=64 time=8.856 ms
16 bytes from fd6e:7763:6711::862, icmp_seq=1 hlim=64 time=6.575 ms
16 bytes from fd6e:7763:6711::862, icmp_seq=2 hlim=64 time=3.506 ms
16 bytes from fd6e:7763:6711::862, icmp_seq=3 hlim=64 time=7.217 ms
16 bytes from fd6e:7763:6711::862, icmp_seq=4 hlim=64 time=3.652 ms
16 bytes from fd6e:7763:6711::862, icmp_seq=5 hlim=64 time=3.578 ms
16 bytes from fd6e:7763:6711::862, icmp_seq=6 hlim=64 time=4.321 ms

But I know less than nothing about IPv6 addressing, so I have no idea if this is relevant or not.

[lordwizzard]

Is IPV4 along with IPV6 enabled on the network/router? When you set up the HA did you enable both IPV4 and IPV6?

Did you use DHCP or static IP addressing on the NUC/HA?

Is this installed a container or VM? Did you do the network share addressing setups/forwarding?

[stevemann (Stephen Mann (YAML-challenged))]

Again:

@stevemann

What is the IP address of the PC?

Can you ping your router?

[SomeGuy5468]

@stevemann

Again:

@stevemann

What is the IP address of the PC?

Can you ping your router?

My apologies. I missed that question.
My laptop IP address is 192.168.1.25.
I can successfully ping my router at 192.168.1.1, and I can access the internet.

[SomeGuy5468]

@lordwizzard

Is IPV4 along with IPV6 enabled on the network/router?

I would assume both IPv4 and IPv6 are enabled, as my laptop has an IPv4 address (192.168.1.25) and HA appears to have an IPv6 address (fd6e:7763:6711::862), but it’s a crappy Starlink router, so there are pretty much no controls or options.

@lordwizzard

When you set up the HA did you enable both IPV4 and IPV6?

I flashed my NUC’s SSD with Home Assistant OS using the haos_generic-x86-64-10.5.img.xz image as directed by the Generic x86-64 Installation Instructions. I don’t know what it enables by default, but I’ve tried net update eno1 --ipv4-method auto, net update eno1 --ipv6-method auto, net update eno1 --ipv6-method disabled (this one obviously killed all network connectivity, including HA Observer).

@lordwizzard

Did you use DHCP or static IP addressing on the NUC/HA?

If I don’t change it, I’m guessing it’s using DHCP. The Starlink router doesn’t let me reserve IPs, so I don’t know that static would be a good method with my current setup.

@lordwizzard

Is this installed a container or VM? Did you do the network share addressing setups/forwarding?

I don’t exactly know what this question means, but I flashed the SSD on my Intel NUC with Home Assistant OS, so I’m not sure if this question applies to my situation.

Thank you for trying to help me. Please let me know if there’s any additional information that I can provide to help us understand what’s going on.

[francisp (Francis)]

Could be crappy Balena Etcher again

Dns borked after flashing drive with balena etcher

While flashing haos, balena etcher froze at 31% multiple times, but on reboot, ha seemed to run normally except that i was unable to use anything that relied on dns resolution, like connecting to home assistant cloud/nabu casa, opower or pirateweather. I tried to use rpi-imager to flash the disk, but it does not allow for flashing to non-removable drives (at least the gui version doesn’t). Once I realized that I could use rpi-imager in cli mode and flash to disk that way, I was able to flash hao…

Flashing hard drive get stuck at 31% (balena fetcher)

Hi everyone, I am a 2 year long HA user and I just bought a pre-owned HP thinclient t620 to run HA (to replace my current VM). I performed a few checks and the thinclient works just fine. I then proceeded to install home assistant following this guide : Generic x86-64 - Home Assistant. I first created a live Ubuntu usb drive and loaded ubuntu from the usb on the thinclient. From the ubuntu, I downloaded the HAOS image as well as balena. Then, flashed the hard drive on the thinclient with th…

[stevemann (Stephen Mann (YAML-challenged))]

@francisp

Could be crappy Balena Etcher again

Very doubtful. Balena works OK if you download the binary and flash directly to the boot device. It craps out when doing a burn from URL.

[SomeGuy5468]

I didn’t experience any noticeable anomalies while flashing the NUC’s SSD with the downloaded image through Balena Etcher. I certainly wasn’t brave enough to let BE flash from a URL.

[stevemann (Stephen Mann (YAML-challenged))]

You have done everything correctly. I have never seen an install of the X86 binary fail to get an IPV4 address.

Try rebooting the router. The router is also your DHCP server, which assigns the IPV4 addresses, so rebooting the router might resolve the problem.

On your PC, download the Advanced IP Scanner. Run the IP Scanner. When it’s finished, look for your HomeAssistant server. Here is how mine presents:

From here you can see the IPV4 address and the computer’s MAC address.

@SomeGuy5468

The Starlink router doesn’t let me reserve IPs

The OFFICIAL nomenclature is “Permanent Lease”, but different routers use different terminology. (I can imagine the tech support calls- “What do you mean lease? I own my router”). It refers to the lease time of the DHCP IP address assignment. As long as that lease time has not expired, when the DHCP server sees the same MAC address, it will reassign the same IP address. A permanent lease never expires, so for all practical purposes it acts like a static IP address (without the headaches). So, look through the router manual for “fixed IP, lease, or reserved”. You may find a reference to static IP, but that usually means the IP address of your router. Don’t go there.

I am not a fan of static IP addresses of my network devices. My IP scan shows that I have 142 devices on my network. Can you imagine the nightmare of documentation to keep track of this many IP assignments. That’s the beauty of DHCP. You don’t have to do anything. There’s a reason that using DHCP is the default.

@SomeGuy5468

I don’t exactly know what this question means, but I flashed the SSD on my Intel NUC with Home Assistant OS, so I’m not sure if this question applies to my situation.

Don’t worry about containers, Docker, VM or Proxmox. Since you are installing HAOS directly to the boot device, there is no need at all to add yet another layer to your installation. You only need one of those if you are doing other things on the NUC besides Home Asistant.

[stevemann (Stephen Mann (YAML-challenged))]

BTW, most browsers can’t handle IPV6 addresses, so no surprise that http://fd6e:7763:6711::862:8123 won’t work, but ping will.

[lordwizzard]

What version of HAOS did you use?

See: HassOS installation/network problem on Intel NUC - #14 by karlg

[orange-assistant (the real one)]

@SomeGuy5468

I didn’t experience any noticeable anomalies while flashing

Is this a recent install? Do you remember your balena etcher spyware version?

@stevemann

Very doubtful. Balena works OK if you download the binary and flash directly to the boot device.

That times are probably over

@orange-assistant

As balena etcher contains ad- & spyware and sends information what users do to the headquarters the logically next step (if I would be a badware producer) would be to manipulate image writes on the fly and may inject some custom DNS settings which allows enrolling more ads and trackers on the users who made the mistake using etcher in the first place.

A tool like etcher but without adware, spyware and known security vulnerables (eol electron) is called usbimager . It’s plain simple, works like it should and even outperforms etcher writing compressed images. Sometimes less (usbimager ~300kb) is better than more (etcher ware ~500.000kb with all dependencies).

Home Assistant should really do the move (like many other FOSS projects did already) and dumb that badware etcher ones and for all (remove it from all docs and suggest to don’t use it!).

@orange-assistant

• Please do not recommend Etcher spyware · Issue #1346 · raspberrypi/documentation · GitHub
• Remove Etcher spyware application by sneak · Pull Request #73195 · Homebrew/homebrew-cask · GitHub
• Do not use Etcher - Spyware · Issue #1 · greenonline/ThreeFives · GitHub
• Balena Etcher Privacy Concerns · Issue #375 · t2linux/wiki · GitHub

[SomeGuy5468]

@stevemann

BTW, most browsers can’t handle IPV6 addresses, so no surprise that http://fd6e:7763:6711::862:8123 won’t work, but ping will.

I thought this, too, but you can imagine my surprise to find that http://[fd6e:7763:6711::862]:4357]/ DOES appear to reach my Home Assistant NUC and show me a good Observer status. Replacing :4357 with :8123 gives me a connection refused (as if the port is not open) rather than a host unreachable (no device found at this IP address) error. That’s what seems incredibly strange to me.

[SomeGuy5468]

@lordwizzard

What version of HAOS did you use?

I flashed my NUC’s SSD with Home Assistant OS using the haos_generic-x86-64-10.5.img.xz image as directed by the Generic x86-64 Installation Instructions.

[SomeGuy5468]

@orange-assistant

Is this a recent install? Do you remember your balena etcher spyware version?

Yes, this is a brand new install that I attempted this weekend with Belena Etcher Version 1.18.11

Spyware? I don’t know much about Etcher (I have used it with Raspberry Pi installations before, though) other than the fact that the official Home Assistant installation guide told me to use it.

I suppose I could try usbimager, but if Etcher is spyware, I’m not sure that a random recommendation over the internet for a different tool really boosts my confidence in THAT tool not being spyware.