@Anwen
Many thanks for this. I’ve set up Tailscale so that I have remote access to my caravan in the companion app. I’ve added an extra server and pointed towards the Tailscale 100.x.x.x. IP address I got.
So far so good, any like you say, if I’m happy swapping between the servers, I would be done.
But I also tried taking it the next step;
I installed Tailscale add-on on both HA instances and tried adding the 100.x.x.x IP address using Remote Home-Assistant in my “Home HA”, in order to connect it to the Tailscale “Caravan HA”.
For some reason I can’t get this to work.
Is there a network limitation that I’m not aware off preventing this?
I have not used Remote HA so unfortunately I can’t help with that. I keep my two instances separate and don’t have a need to combine them for my use case. Maybe someone with experience with that integration will have some ideas.
Are you able to ping the remote HA ip address (caravan) from a “Home HA” terminal ?
If not this means that probably your two Tailscale implementations are not seeing each other (no tunnel between the two) and therefore no possibility to create a remote Home-Assistant node…
I don’t know Tailscale to create this tunnel but I have searched on google and this could be possible maybe using ACL’s… but cannot help more on this part…
Hi @uSlackr ,
Not in the way I wanted unfortunately.
I ended up running my home via Nabu Casa.
The caravan has a RPI4 running on the 12v caravan battery and internet access is via Wi-Fi to a separate 4G modem that has a battery and is also charged by the caravan 12v.
We have a solar panel, so the battery will not drain.
The Caravan HA is setup with Tailscale and I need to swap between the servers in the HA companion app.
It works ok, but not in the way I originally wanted.
I haven’t setup any notifications yet. This is potentially an area where I’ll run into trouble. Not sure if I’ll get notifications from my caravan server if I have my home server active in the app (and vice versa)…
I did try to install Tailscale on both my home and caravan servers. But the Tailscale plug-in doesn’t seem built for communicating with other Tailscale servers.
I can only get the IP data etc from my caravan server on my home server, ie the data and entities coming from Tailscale itself, but the other entities available on my caravan server is not available to my home server
Thanks. Feeling the same pain here. I feel there is a solution, but so far I’ve not found it.
Re: Notifications - I believe you are right so far a mobile app notification go. There are other methods like Telegram that could work.
Check this discussion. Frenck is open that this approach is simply a wrong way to solve our problem. The VPN client<>server has to be on a higher level, not between HA instances, between the machines.
Hi,
So, anyone with a good solution for a pi to pi VPN for remote home assistant yet?
Just about to setup a pi with HA at my mother in laws cabin and there I only have a pretty simple TP-link 4G router without any VPN client capabilities. Here the 4G Carrer used virtual sub ip networks so it’s impossible to host any servers over 4G even with dyndns.
At home I however is running unifi so I have a simple L2TP VPN server running on the router.
Any suggestions for a simple lan to lan VPN solution? Is there any VPN clients for HA that can set up site to site? Feels wrong as it should be the gateways but that option is gone in my current situation.
There seems to be a bug. I use Tailscale vpn tunnel integrated in home assistant. The bug seems to be that you have to enable and disable the feature called “Userspace networking mode” in the configuration dialog of the addon. So enable, save, restart. Then disable it, save, restart. Since then, the tailscale is able to open the vpn. Remote HA from HACS starts working.
Hi Automan, I hope it is still working. I am struggling to make it happen although I feel I am close.
I have Tailscale installed on both instances.
The add-on runs and is connected
I have my main instance connected to NabuCasa cloud and works in the companion app (iphone).
I have my remote instance connected via Tailscale and works in the companion app. I have tailscale on my phone.
On my laptop via tailscale both instances are up and connected.
I have installed Remote HA on both instances as well. On the remote instance it all went well. I add the required yaml in my config as described in the documentation.
So far so good.
However if i want to add the remote node to the main instance I get consistently a Fail to connect to the server.
I have tried to follow the trick by enabling and disabling the uberspace networking mode but that doesnt seem to go well.
In fact it gives a saving error and I dont know why. I installed Tailscale without changing any option.
Can you help me with some points I need to check and verify please.
Hi Ed,
All instances must be connected to TS.
Userspace… enable then start addon. Once connected to TS network, disable userspace, restart addon. It is 100% working w Remote Assistant 4.4.
Do it on all the instances.
Not sure if Nabu Casa connection is an issue. I don’t use it. If you see all the instances on the TS admin console as connected it should work
it doesnt work. I guess I have an issue with Nabu Casa
Not sure what is wrong still.
You could do me a favor if you show my your format for the host in Remote HA. I have to exclude the obvious mistakes which I can make. I am doubting everything by now.
I got it working. I need to leave the http:// out. These formats should be in the documentation but it’s not. Endless trial and error to figure it out on a non-issue
It working now but I noticed that in the main instance I can’t change names and icons. The default icon is passed through. I can’t modify the icons in any form. And the naming with the prefix doesn’t look to good either. That means I have to give the entities in the remote already meaningful names referring to the remote and drop the prefix
