Failing to reconnect to HA

Describe the bug

I am running a single host on my house (it’s a small house xD). I am running Room-Assistant via docker. I also run Home-Assistant and Mosquitto with docker. I am noticing that my device trackers are losing state information occasionally.

To reproduce

I am pinpointing it to HA restarts and/or Mosquitto restarts. For example today the mosquitto container updated itself. HA is not able to recognise device state since then.

Relevant logs

4/12/2021, 6:44:39 PM - info - HomeAssistantService: Re-connected to broker
4/12/2021, 6:44:39 PM - info - EntitiesService: Refreshing entity states
4/15/2021, 1:01:12 AM - error - HomeAssistantService: connect ECONNREFUSED 192.168.x.x:1883
4/15/2021, 1:01:13 AM - error - HomeAssistantService: connect ECONNREFUSED 192.168.x.x:1883
4/15/2021, 1:01:15 AM - info - HomeAssistantService: Re-connected to broker
4/15/2021, 1:01:15 AM - info - EntitiesService: Refreshing entity states

Relevant configuration

---
global:
  instanceName: "Antas Studio"
  integrations:
    - homeAssistant
    - bluetoothClassic
homeAssistant:
  mqttUrl: 'mqtt://192.168.x.x:1883'
bluetoothClassic:
  interval: 30
  addresses:
    - A4:D9:31:BD:F4:ZZ
    - 60:BE:C4:C8:FA:ZZ

My docker containers

  # Home Assistant Core - Home Automation
  homeassistant:
    image: homeassistant/home-assistant:latest
    container_name: homeassistant
    restart: always
    depends_on:
      - mariadb
      - adguard
      - mosquitto
    network_mode: host
    volumes:
      - $DOCKERDIR/homeassistant/config:/config
      - $DOCKERDIR/shared:/shared
    environment:
      PUID: $PUID
      PGID: $PGID
      TZ: $TZ
    labels:
      # Diun
      - "diun.enable=true"

  # Mosquitto - MQTT Broker
  # dexec mosquitto /bin/sh -> mosquitto_passwd -b /mosquitto/config/passwd username passwd
  mosquitto:
    image: eclipse-mosquitto:latest
    container_name: mosquitto
    restart: unless-stopped
    security_opt:
      - no-new-privileges:true
    ports:
      - $MOSQUITTO_HTTP_PORT:1883 #http
      # - $MOSQUITTO_HTTPS_PORT:8883 #https
      - $MOSQUITTO_WEBSOCKET_PORT:9001 #websockets
    command: mosquitto -c /mosquitto-no-auth.conf
    environment:
      PUID: $PUID
      PGID: $PGID
      TZ: $TZ
    labels:
      ## Watchtower
      - "com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.enable=true"

  # Room Assistant
  roomassistant:
    image: mkerix/room-assistant
    container_name: roomassistant
    restart: always
    security_opt:
      - no-new-privileges:true
    depends_on:
      - mosquitto
      - homeassistant
    cap_add:
      - NET_ADMIN
    network_mode: host
    volumes:
      - $DOCKERDIR/roomassistant/config:/room-assistant/config
      - /var/run/dbus:/var/run/dbus
    labels:
      ## Watchtower
      - "com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.enable=true"

Expected behavior

When ever room assistant reconnects to HA/Mosquitto I’d expect the entities to be properly available in HA.

Environment

• room-assistant version: 2.16.0
• installation type: Docker
• hardware: NUC
• OS: Ubuntu 20.04

[beloso]

I changed my MQTT config. Now I am persisting retained messages. I missed that detail when setting up MQTT. I believe this fixes it.

I’ll close this now and reopen if I notice any problems.

[mKeRix]

Thanks for providing these additional details - they give a pretty good hint. I believe what’s happening here is that room-assistant sends the HA config discovery information once when the entity is created, but not again on reconnect. This is done because the discovery information doesn’t change during the application lifecycle of room-assistant. Since the messages are marked as to retain they should be available to HA anytime, but this of course doesn’t work if the MQTT broker does not persist the messages across restarts. Since upgrading the container image starts a fresh instance the previously retained messages are lost.

My main suggestion would be to create a volume for /mosquitto/data on your mqtt container (if you can) and see if that fixes it for you. This volume should take care of carrying over retained messages across container upgrades.