Struggling to reliably and consistently connect to Home Assistant Dashboard

Installation
1

Hi all! Home Assistant has been so much fun to start working with. However, I’ve had a lot of trouble connecting to the front-end dashboard on various devices. It seemingly would bounce around which of my devices it would work on, with about 75% reliability (completely down otherwise), and now has stopped working all together.

Setup

  • Running bare metal on Beelink S12 Pro Mini PC. Basically followed this guide to install via Ubuntu on a USB stick. Haven’t had any problems with the server running continuously – the automations I did get set up on the frontend dashboard have just worked.

Initial Working Model

  • On boot, the HAOS CLI showed IPv4 address as 192.168.68.66. It also mentioned using http://homeassistant.local:8123 to access the dashboard.
  • I set my HA dashboard under Settings > Network to have a static IPv4 address as 192.168.68.66. This is all I did. I did not reserve the IP address on my router or do anything else.
  • I was consistently able to connect to the dashboard on the first device (“Macbook 1”) I used out of the gate. I typically would just connect on browser with http://homeassistant.local:8123. Most of the time on the other devices, I could not connect to the dashboard in a browser with that URL or the IP address.
  • I had variable success using the Home Assistant app on my iPhone, Macbook 1, and Macbook 2. Half the time the app would recognize the server automatically. Sometimes I could plug in the IP or local URL to make it work. The rest of the time it just wouldn’t work.
  • Inconsistencies have been version-independent. I updated earlier last night to 2024.8.0, but this has been going on since I initially set this up in mid June.

Last night I was working on the browser-based dashboard on Macbook 1 for awhile. Out of nowhere it crashed (a few hours after update to 2024.8.0). My MiniPC server never stopped. I rebooted it for testing.

Changes

I was able to connect still last night via my iPhone app. Weirdly it was only working on there. I followed some guides online and tried a few things:

  1. Went onto my router app (Deco XE75 mesh network) and reserved an IP for home assistant. I switched to 192.168.68.55 arbitrarily to try something new. I made sure to associate this with the MAC address for the Beelink.
  2. Went onto networking tab on the iPhone app and updated the static IP to 192.168.68.55.
  3. Changed the name on the networking tab from homeassistant to home-assistant. Someone had mentioned somewhere that changing it had helped temporarily for them. I think from here I completely lost access on my iPhone.
  4. Rebooted the MiniPC. Now it shows IPv4 as 192.168.68.55/22. It also now says that the URL is http://home-assistant.local:8123. The Deco app is properly showing it with that IP as well. So everything updated successfully.

Now I have not been able to connect to the dashboard with any device whatsoever. I tried Macbook1, Macbook2, and iPhone. I’ve tried both in browser and with Home Assistant app. I’ve tried http://home-assistant.local:8123, https:home-assistant.local:8123, and 196.168.68.55:8123.

Any guidance here would be immensely helpful! This has been a very frustrating process.

2

You changed all kinds of things to a static address ending in 192.168.68.55, but as far as I can tell from your description, HA is still set to a static address 192.168.68.66.

3

I was able to switch the static IP on the network tab on the dashboard from my phone to 192.168.68.55 (see point 2 under “Changes”), which I actually think was the point at which I lost dashboard accessibility.

Concurrently everything was switched on Deco and so on.

Booted HAOS CLI currently shows 192.168.68.55 as well.

I’m pretty sure I got the dashboard switched before changing everything else. Any way for me to brute force access it to check? Any CLI settings?

4

Shouldn’t that be /24?