And this is what I see after updating. The two plugs are no longer connected the initial ZBT1 border router (blue circle) but to a new one (red circle), which didn’t exist before. OTBR still shows HA as the same and only border router in my system.
Nothing has changed other than running the update. Independently of this I had ordered two additional Eve plugs. Now curious to see how they will fit into the mesh.
P.S.: The question marks are probably left overs in the Eve plugs’ internal Thread tables. I’ve read that Eve is notorious for not completely resetting the tables and that devices require two resets before they are fully clean again.
I wouldn’t worry about it too much since everything is working. Give it a day or 2 and look at the map again. It does take a bit of time sometime to see an accurate map after any change to the mesh.
I am not worried. As you said, everything is working. Fortunately - or my boss at home would give me a hard time. Imagine window handles being locked and not opening again.
It’s simply that the Thread topic is in part a mystery to me.
Zigbee is in the same boat. Those maps make zero sense most of the time. We need to keep the WAF high for sure in order to buy all the junks we don’t need
I was able to get rid of the annoying unknown devices in my mesh. Following up on my working hypothesis that the “?” were left-overs in the plug’s internal reference table, I performed a factory-reset one the plug with the three “?” and re-paired with HA. The new device got registered under its previous name, thus doubling all its entities. This was cleared with a restart of HA. Interestingly this removed only one of the three "?.
The final solution was actually much simpler. It is sufficient to disconnect the Eve plugs for one minute, plug them back in and then reload the OBTR integration. My mesh is now much clearer.
is my ZBT-1. Does the USB stick always display as external hence unknown border router?
is an Eve plug that should display as such but is represented as another border router. I can control devices on this node from HA, but the mesh shows them as unconnected.
is yet another border router, however, physically the same as 4
I restarted HA (HAOS in a VM) and OTBR but not the RPi5 itself. The two entries remain. Any idea how to remove the duplicate entry?
I then switched on the Beta in OTBR. The ZBT-1 still shows as “Router (external)”. In exchange I got 8+4 “?” again. I guess that these come from the “old” ZBT-1 service.
EDIT:
I uninstalled the OTBR app, rebooted and reinstalled. While this removed he duplicate entry, it led to losing the OTBR preferred network. I was unable to redefine it and decided to roll back my proxmox image. So for the moment I live with the double entry.
I had a very similar issue recently. I was seeing an 'official' homeassistant-otbrha-thread-XXXX node but there was also a ghost device named External router (ABCD)ha-thread-XXXX. I was trying to 'shake it off' by restarting HA, reinstalling thread integration etc, but none of that worked.
Then I noticed that the ghost device was 'hanging' on a couple of router nodes (smart power sockets in my case). I unplugged them for a few minutes and things started to look much better. The sockets were no longer connected to that ghost external router - only a few of sleepy nodes remained attached to it. There were now on an 'island'. What I did was re-interviewing each of these sleepy nodes one by one, which detached them to the ghost node. When the last sleepy node got detached, the whole 'External router' disappeared!
Not sure if unplugging the power sockets was necessary, maybe I could just re-interview them too. But it seems like it was some routing cache sitting inside these devices or their representation in HA.
PS: I only have a single ZBT-2 border router. There are no duplicate entries in the 'Open Thread Border Router' unlike in the previous comment. The issue with a ghost External router was only on the 'Thread' tab with the network graph.
