I’ve been trying for yonks (>two full days, plus crashing HA along the way) to get duckdns to work on my home assistant, so that I can remote access it from my telephone. Without success. There are pages and pages of people trying to get it to work, with multiple suggestions, mostly without success. I then came across Tailscale, it took me all of ten minutes to set it up, and WORKING. Whow, so hope this helps anybody trying to get remote access to their home assistant. This is not a publicity for Tailscale or Duckdns, just I’m so pleased to get it finally working.
OK, you bet me, it took me 15 min to setup WireGuard on my opnsense-based router and install it on my phone and my laptop. Now I can access my entire network from everywhere, including full access to HA.
Not saying tailscale is bad but for me WireGuard was sufficient easy…
Lol no, Tailscale is incredibly simple, even if you don’t have any idea how any of this works. Just install a client on your device, sign in, and you’re on the same network as your other devices. The fact that you have an opnsense router means that you’re comfortable with a level of networking complexity that most people simply cannot handle.
Fair, but I guess we could agree that a lot of people on this community are not exactly matching your “most people” bin. Having alternatives is always a good idea. And taken that some people run HA on pretty exotic hardware, there is a chance that tailscale doesn’t work with it (albeit I agree they do a pretty good job in supporting as much platforms and distros as possible). Talking about alternatives… There is netbird as well ;)
I have a GL.iNet travel router which has Tailscale support built in, so I can access Home Assistant and my NAS from anywhere in one go
IDK man. I set up DuckDNS 2 years ago and since then I had to update HomeAssistant settings just once when they introduced public address in settings. No failures, no problems. Rest is done automatically and my alert for expiring certificate never triggered.
I’m happy that you found solution with Tailscale but DuckDNS is also good and reliable in my experience.
I haven’t had the same experience with DuckDNS. It was great for a few years, but for about the past year it would randomly go down (preventing access) or my domain would get flagged as spam. I ended up buying my own domain from cloudflare but I’m planning on investigating Tailscale at some point.
Wireguard + duckdns is simple setup, but lot of people prefer tailscale cuz its even more simple to set up or they cant forward port or they might be behind cgnat. I just dont like additional company between me and my server, so im avoiding it as long as I can
After reading what you wrote and as I have time, being retired… thought I’d look at what you suggested, so now I have Duckdns & WireGuard setup as well, it’s no where as easy as Tailscale. So I wrote a post, rather long 😭 on my blog about setting it up https://www.minty95.com/remote-access-home-assistant-from-your-phone/ Maybe it will help others save time. Thanks for giving me the idea to look into it 👍
Nice, that guide is quite detailed. Btw, duckdns cant provide remote connection on its own. Wireguard can if you know your home IP. Since most users dont have static IP, they can use dynamic dns service like duckdns that tracks your home IP and nothing else. Many home routers also support dynamic dns and/or VPN server.
Forwarding ports can be a pain, I admit, here in France you get a routeur supplied when you sign up for fiber, and of course they are all different. I got WireGuard with Duckdns working, though impossible to get just duckdns to work on it’s own. And it was was far more difficult than just tailscale.
Tail scale is great but the way its magic dns works has broken my device’s Internet more than thrice. Primarily on Android (there’s a long standing bug report) but also on Linux (before I fixed the firewall). If Android is your primary device I would absolutely not recommend tail scale for ha.
The problem is that to make magic dns work, it has to override your local dns settings, which is fine until it breaks. For example, if private DNS is enabled in Android (which it is by default) then when your phone switches networks, dns straight up doesn’t work until you toggle TS off and on. Which means your internet doesn’t work. And magic dns is “needed” to get a TS https certificate (if you have another valid cert, this is less important).
On my Android I have private DNS on and a tasker profile to toggle TS whenever the network changes. It is not ideal.
