Thread devices all unavailable

Configuration Matter/Thread
1

Last week I commissioned six Ikea KAJPLATS lightbulbs successfully; get hass_otbr up and running, set up IV6, etc. all fine. Today, they’re all showing as unavailable in HA, even though they are still connected to the border router. In HA, the Device Info panel for the matter devices is showing correct MAC address and network name, but wrong Node IDs (old ones, I suspect) and no IP addresses.

Screenshot 2026-02-11 at 17.41.33
Screenshot 2026-02-11 at 17.41.33656×1066 48.4 KB

But haos_otbr knows their IP addresses correctly:

# docker exec -it hass_otbr ot-ctl meshdiag topology ip6-addrs
id:44 rloc16:0xb000 ext-addr:163e9ed3a85e0c2d ver:4 - me - leader
    3-links:{ 46 53 }
    2-links:{ 22 24 31 36 }
    ip6-addrs:
        fd8c:470d:c328:8304:0:ff:fe00:fc38
        fd8c:470d:c328:8304:0:ff:fe00:fc10
        fd8c:470d:c328:8304:0:ff:fe00:fc00
        fd8c:470d:c328:8304:0:ff:fe00:b000
        fd8c:470d:c328:8304:f6b3:e9c:5189:e00d
        fe80:0:0:0:143e:9ed3:a85e:c2d
id:22 rloc16:0x5800 ext-addr:b255bf00ace5b1a1 ver:5
    3-links:{ 24 31 36 44 46 53 }
    ip6-addrs:
        fd8c:470d:c328:8304:0:ff:fe00:5800
        fd8c:470d:c328:8304:43da:2e14:fe68:27cc
        fe80:0:0:0:b055:bf00:ace5:b1a1
id:24 rloc16:0x6000 ext-addr:f659177faa345911 ver:5
    3-links:{ 22 31 36 44 46 53 }
    ip6-addrs:
        fd8c:470d:c328:8304:0:ff:fe00:6000
        fd8c:470d:c328:8304:68d5:b35f:4a0b:cd68
        fe80:0:0:0:f459:177f:aa34:5911

(etc.)

HA instance can ping these IP addresses; but it seems like it’s not getting the IP address information from OTBR - maybe because its idea of the node IDs is wrong? I’ve tried restarting the OTBR and the Thread and Matter integrations in HA, but nothing obvious yet. Anyone seen something like this?

2

You are not alone. Pretty sure this is a bug but it’s hard to even figure out where to start with this one. It’s half baked integration that is the problem

3

Is there any idea on how to diagnose this? I had a similar issue. Set up my thread network, paired an Ikea Myggbett, it worked a couple of days. Then the otbr container became unstable, I restarted it and see the Mygbett again in the children table, but HA keeps saying not available. Restarting HA also does not solve the problem

4

I managed to stabilize my setup and now the Thread network seems to work without any issue. My border router is a VM. I use a SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus V2 with firmware ot-rcp-v2.3.1.0-zbdonglee-460800.gbl

The VM is based on Debian 13 Trixie. 1 CPU core, 2GB ram, I’m running a container from openthread/border-router:latest, using docker (Previously, I tried podman, but the container crashed every couple of days without reason). The required changes to enable IP forwarding should be written to /etc/sysctl.d/99-otbr.conf (If you put them in /etc/sysctl.conf won´t be loaded at boot time. My key takeaways are: use docker and stay away from /etc/sysctl.conf

If you are interested, I can post detailed steps I used to build my OpenThread border router