remote access to Homebridge home kit devices worked forever, now failing

Expected Behavior

Both remote and local access to my Wemo and Nest devices via Homebridge has worked just fine for a very long time.

Current Behavior

Recently, remote access to Homebridge devices started failing on a regular basis, while local access still works just fine. HomeKit native devices (iHome, Koogeek, Chamberlain) all continue to work fine, both locally and remotely. I had an iPad (latest iOS), and two AppleTVs(4th Gen 64GB, latest tvOS) serving as Homekit hubs, and recently added a HomePod. This problem seems to have been begun around the time the AppleTV’s auto-upgraded to the latest tvOS). Homebridge is running on an iMac (Sierra 10.12.6), and produces no errors. Over the course of trying to figure this out, I have tried removing various of the hubs from service, removing all the cached files on Homebridge and restarting, removing Homebridge from Home and re-adding, and hundreds of permutations of these changes. Homebridge devices seemed to work intermittently remotely, but always locally. It appears, however, that in truth it was working (remotely) ONLY when the iPad was the hub and the rest (AppleTVs or HomePod) Standby or off/disabled. Possibly a red herring given the bugginess of the HomePod, but it never thinks the Homebridge devices are responding (locally, obviously), even when they are working fine in the iOS Home App and the iPad is the primary Homekit Hub.

Steps to Reproduce (for bugs)

I can reproduce reliably as follows: Homebridge Wemo and Nest devices all responding (locally and remotely) fine with iPad as Homekit Hub. Turn off iPad and when the HomePod or AppleTV become the hub, remote access fails, while local access continues to work.

Versions

• Homebridge: homebridge --version 0.4.38
• Node: node --version v6.9.4
• OS: Mac OS Sierra (10.12.6)

Configuration

Homebridge Log / Command Output

[ur7x]

My Homebridge failed a few days ago too. Was fine through the end of last year and then a week or so ago it just stopped.

I have tried everything above and nothing is working.

I can see my Apple TV’s remotely but everything else is “Unavailable”

[earlyshen]

I got mine worked. I found that I didn’t change the default username & pin listed in config-sample.jcon

    "bridge": {
        "name": "Homebridge",
        "username": "CC:22:3D:E3:CE:30",
        "port": 51826,
        "pin": "031-45-154"
    },
   ...

I follow the instruction in https://github.com/nfarina/homebridge#my-ios-app-cant-find-homebridge. Now it works for me both on LAN and on LTE

This is what I did:

1. Remove Homebridge from Apple Home App
2. Stop Homebridge on raspberry pi
3. rm -rf ~/.homebridge/persist
4. Change “username” & “piin” in config.json to something else
5. Run Homebridge
6. Add Homebridge to Apple Home App

Hope that helps for some of you in this thread 😃