Zigbee2MQTT fails to Start with "No such file or directory, cannot open /dev/ttyUSB0" on Sonoff Dongle in Home Assistant (VirtualBox)

Configuration Zigbee
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Hi everyone,

I’m encountering an issue with Zigbee2MQTT in my Home Assistant setup, and I could use some help troubleshooting. I’m running Home Assistant (version 2025.4.4) in a VirtualBox VM on Linux Ubuntu. My Zigbee coordinator is a Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus (ZBDongle-E), which was working fine until a few days ago. Now, when I try to start Zigbee2MQTT (version 2.3.0-1), I get the following error in the logs:

[2025-05-04 00:49:54] error: z2m: Error: Error: No such file or directory, cannot open /dev/ttyUSB

What I’ve checked:

  • The Sonoff dongle is visible in my host OS and appears in the VirtualBox USB device filters. I can see it passed through to the HA VM (confirmed via ls -la /dev/serial/by-id).
  • The dongle is mapped to /dev/ttyUSB0 in the VM, but Zigbee2MQTT still fails to access it.
  • I’ve disabled the ZHA integration to avoid conflicts.
  • I suspect a recent HA update, Zigbee2MQTT update, or VirtualBox configuration change might be causing this, as it stopped working suddenly.
  • I’ve tried updating the serial port in Zigbee2MQTT’s configuration.yaml to /dev/ttyUSB0 and the /dev/serial/by-id path, but the error persists.
  • Permissions for /dev/ttyUSB0 seem correct (crw-rw---- root dialout), but I’m not sure if the HA container or VirtualBox is causing access issues.
  • I’ve tried adding both the adapter: zstack and adapter: ember to z2m config and configuration.yaml. No sucess, same error.
  • And last attempt was trying to set the /dev/serial/by-id/usb-Itead_Sonoff_Zigbee_3.0_USB_Dongle_Plus_V2_12bd00f3d273ef11af12e21e313510fd-if00-port0 at z2m config and configuration.yaml, no sucess either.

For some reason, my dongle isn’t being recognized anymore by Home Assistant, as it doesn’t show up on Settings > Hardware > All hardware.

Any thoughts or ideas?

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Starting from version 2.2.0, z2m should have auto-discovery functionality, so there’s no need to add the port and adapter parameters. You can try connecting the device via Sonoff Dongle Flasher to see if the dongle can recognize the firmware.