Windows VirtualBox installation, HA stopped loading

1

Hello

I’m relatively new to HA - I’ve been tinkering with it for about a month now with a small network of devices
(maybe a dozen) and built maybe 20 automations. I installed on a Windows 11 desktop that my wife uses for some small projects and we also have a Plex server running on it. It works fine for what we have, but the goal is to eventually move HA and Plex onto a NUC or similar. It’s just not in the cards right now.

Everything was working fine until about 3 days ago. One of my wireless switches wasn’t responding so I tried logging into the HA through my iPhone and it wouldn’t connect. I checked the PC and the VirtualBox seemed to be up and running, but I couldn’t launch the web GUI.

I’ve rebooted the PC, the VirtualBox, my modem and router… and can’t seem to get anything to respond. When I load up the VB, it lands on the same home page and data that it always has, it just doesn’t seem like HA is responding.

I don’t think anything changed on the network otherwise. For what it’s worth, the Plex server is still up and working.

I’m not sure what to look for or try next. Overall, it wouldn’t be a massive deal for me to start over, but I don’t even know if starting over would fix what is happening?

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

2

I fixed my own issue. I’m not quite sure how I got where I did or whey it failed when it failed. Hard to explain, too.

A week or so ago, we lost power and when everything came back up, HA wasn’t connecting. I assumed it was an IP issue so I logged into my router and reserved the IP for the computer (.16). Everything seemed to work fine for a few days - automations still ran, dashboard would load, the PC was still online.

I’d guess that continued for at least 3 days, then the HA wouldn’t respond.

Tonight, I cleared that reservation and assigned a static to the PC (.21). As soon as I did that, the HA dashboard came up using the .16.

I’m able to ping HA (.16) from another computer on my network, but unable to ping the computer (.21) but the computer is still online.

Plex came back up on my AppleTV, but on the Xbox, I had to manually enter the server IP (.21).

I’m glad it’s all working, but I’m confused. I thought, since I have VB set to use a bridged network, that the PC and VB could use the same IP address. I’m pretty sure that’s how it worked for the last month or so, but not they are using different IPs.