I’m reaching out for help with Home Assistant installed on my TrueNAS. Despite being on the same VLAN, I’m unable to see or integrate my devices within Home Assistant.
I’ve tried various configurations and troubleshooting steps, but unfortunately, I’ve hit a roadblock. I’m almost at the point of giving up, so any guidance or advice from the community would be greatly appreciated.
Here are the details:
TrueNAS server and devices are on the same VLAN
Home Assistant is installed and running on TrueNAS
Devices are not visible or discoverable within Home Assistant
If anyone has experienced similar issues or can offer suggestions, please help!
You need to create a VM in Truenas and then load HA iso and configure it. There are a ton of videos on youtube about it. Start with how to create a VM on Truenas scale and then how to set up HA in a VM.
I am having the same issue, HA can’t see any devices. I would expect that having host_network: true would help as it uses zeroconf/multicast that is unlikely to work on a bridge network but the install UI is mysteriously missing the option to enable it, unlike other apps. In fact even manually editing the user_config.yaml for the app version seems to still run it with a virtualized network. My system is not going to do well with a VM (its a ryzen V1500) so I would really like to figure this out.
I’m not sure it has to be so dramatic. I just tested the HA docker image on my laptop and with host_network: true it has absolutely no issues discovering devices, even with default SELinux settings that prevent DHCP snooping. Unless there is something significantly locked down on the OS side this should work on truenas with a simple app version bump.
The two potential issues I see are (1) at one point host networking did have issues (Home-assistant can't work with host-network enable) but this was in k8s land (2) there may still be some limitations compared to a full VM deploy (e.g. the [aiodhcpwatcher] Cannot watch for dhcp packets: [Errno 1] Operation not permitted issue) may prevent some things from working like bluetooth discovery, but most of core functionality would be unlocked regardless.
There is a pattern of “just VM it” being offered as a solution to any challenge but containers have come a long way in the past couple of years and I’ve had 0 issues running things like Frigate which previously were a hard no. The switch away from the complexity of k8s certainly helps this. I of course wish we were running on a modern OCI system like podman (most of the challenges with podman come from SELinux, but truenas isn’t even running that) but docker-compose is good enough.
Generally speaking the “app” version should work or it should not be offered.
ok I just ran the HA image on the truenas machine with a modified invocation from runlike (changing --network=ix-home-assistant_default to --network=host) and the device discovery fully works
the two issues that came up were:
postgres was not able to connect (makes sense since that service is running on the ix-home-assistant_default network), this should be fixable if both services bind host, but tbh I don’t really know why using the default sqlite isn’t done as the only expected writes are from the HA process and sqlite can be very performant
zeroconf issue with
OSError: [Errno 98] Address in use
2025-03-28 11:07:44.207 ERROR (MainThread) [zeroconf] Address in use when binding to ('', 5353); When using avahi, make sure disallow-other-stacks is set to no in avahi-daemon.conf
which I suspect is also fixable by allocating host ports correctly
I agree and that is my general install method. I fought many HAOS issues with the app and it generally did not work well and was unreliable. I went to a VM and it was 100% stable/reliable/extendable. I am currently running ONE production VM (HAOS) on my Truenas System and a bunch of apps.
I don’t mean to bring a zombie thread back to life, but I’m new and I seem to be running into an issue finding homekit devices on my home assistant app and I think this may be the problem. When you said “see if it works better after June 1”, do you mean there is some known issue that is being resolved in an impending update or more like wishful thinking that maybe, perhaps, if Christmas comes early, there may magically be an improvement?
You’re not alone — many users hit this roadblock when running Home Assistant on TrueNAS, especially due to how network interfaces and discovery protocols behave in virtualized or jailed environments. Even if everything is on the same VLAN, the key issue might be that Home Assistant isn’t properly bridged to the network in a way that supports mDNS, SSDP, or other discovery protocols. This often happens if it’s running in a VM or jail without host networking or bridged NIC access.
On June 1 Truenas is rolling out the ability to apply a unique IP address to an APP, it is my thought that this MAY solve some of the interop issues with Apps and HAOS. I actually moved my HAOS install to a PI5, since it fit my use case, but it worked just fine in a VM for all versions of scale up to 24.1.2
@Theo, thanks. I just found this information after racking my brain over your comment most of the night and this morning. I also wonder if this may help. I’ll hang tight until then and then play around with some more networking options after that before I give up and go with a full VM or move HA to another machine or something. After all, it’s only a little over a week from now and adding this stupid HomeKit thermostat is the only issue I’ve run into so far.
