Can't see my devices on Home assistant on truenas

TrueNAS General
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1

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!

2

Do you have HA installed as an App or a VM? I was not able to get it working as an app and had to put it in a VM.

3

I have installed it as an app.
As a complete beginner, I’d greatly appreciate any step-by-step tutorials or guidance on how to accomplish this.

4

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.

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5

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.

6

Well, I think you have 3 or so options:

  1. Wait for 25.04.0 to go GA and see if it works better there after June 1
  2. Get a Raspberry PI and run it there
  3. Upgrade you system so you can run a tiny vm for HAOS
7

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.

8

the HA app is on stable not community train so ix is absolutely in a position to fix this

and of course right from the top of https://www.truenas.com/docs/truenasapps/stableapps/home-assistant/:

Application maintenance is independent from TrueNAS version release cycles.

9

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

10

here’s a thread talking about how previous sqlite related issues were fixed and how to migrate back from pg: Postgresql to SQLite migration, moving back to SQLite - #6 by LordMike - Community Guides - Home Assistant Community

tbh I don’t really see anyone needing to migrate as the app is currently not usable, so switching back to sqlite should be a non-issue

11

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.

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