Weird installation of mosquitto broker

Configuration
,
1

Hello everyone,

I’m not sure if I have a problem right now. At least it looks kind of weird right now. It’s about the Mosquitto broker.
Right at the beginning of my HA installation, I installed Mosquitto broker according to some instructions on the Internet (of course I don’t remember which ones).
After I received the error message that the MQTT login failed during a special installation of my descaling system via AppDaemon, I took a closer look at MQTT in terms of username and password. And here’s what I don’t really understand:

  • There is no username/password stored in the Mosquitto broker AddOn under configuration (according to the documentation this is only optional)

  • In the MQTT integration under Configure → Reconfigure MQTT, both a user name (strangely “homeassistant”) and a password are stored.

  • A user “mqtt_broker” has been created as a user in HA but I don’t know the password.

Shouldn’t the user in HA and the one in the MQTT integration be the same? And wouldn’t I have to store the user also in the AddOn?

If I change something here, it will probably affect my integrations that are based on MQTT (e.g. Zigbee2MQTT), right?

Thank you in advance for your help!

2

The addon can use any configured home assistant user and password. I usually set up a user named mosquitto and use it for nothing other than mqtt.

3

There are two types of users the broker can use:

  1. Local users, defined in the add-on config. You can not create a local user called "homeassistant’.
  2. Home Assistant users, defined in Home Assistant.

Do not confuse broker local users with Home Assistant local users. These are users defined in Home Assistant that can only access it when connected on the local network.

e.g. here is a Home Assistant local user:

Untitled
Untitled526×537 21.2 KB

That’s unfortunate as you created it. It was not created automatically.

1 Like
4

Thank you for your detailed answer @tom_l
That is exact that what makes me confused.

Yes, I have created the “mqtt_broker” user in HA but I don’t know the password and in the Mosquitto Integration I have added the user “homeassistant” (which is not existing in HA).

How can I clean this up? Is the following possible?

  1. Change the password of the HA-User “mqtt_broker” (and the name to mqtt_user)
  2. Change the configuration of the Mosquitto Integration to the same username and password as created in No.1

Do I break the Zigbee2MQTT Integration with that? Do I have to change here also something?

5

Yes that should work, as long as you don’t have any other devices using that HA user name and password to communicate with the broker. If you do, you will need to change their configuration too.

You can change the zigbee2mqtt configuration to match your new local broker credentials here: config/zigbee2mqtt/configuration.yaml

6

Later I will give it a try. I report if all goes well (or not).
Thank you very much!!

7

So, I have cleaned up. I deleted the existing HA user, created a new one (this time I have saved the password!), changed username + password in the MQTT-integration to the one from the new HA-user and restarted HA. It seems that all works as it should be.
Thank you for your help!

8

Now to change z2m.

9

I have checked but there is a complete different user in it (username addon).

10

Well if it is working, leave it.

1 Like
11

Yes, it works.
But I will have a look tomorrow again

12

The setup is clear cut. HA uses a dedicated Mosquitto user that is defined in the addon config. I have even created three other MQTT users with specific topic access, each for different clients.