NAB 🇬🇧🇪🇺🔶Feb 25
For weeks I've been trying to get #HACS to install on the #homeassistant VM in the camper van. For weeks it's failed - the wget of hacs.zip gets to around 80% and then bombs out. I spent hours diagnosing what on earth was happening, but couldn't get to the bottom of it. I ruled out everything - it just didn't work.
In desperation, I took a backup of the VM and spun it up in the office. It worked fine. WTF? That made no sense at all.
Show threadNAB 🇬🇧🇪🇺🔶Feb 25
I double-checked that MTU wasn't the issue. It wasn't.
This evening I started from scratch. The only difference between the office and the camper installations were the means of connecting to the Internet. The office has a FTTC connection and the camper has an LTE link with Three as the ISP.
"Hmmm", thinks I, "I wonder what happens if I route everything out over a VPN".
Spun up a Mullvad Wireguard VPN and, well, whaddayaknow, it worked.
Show threadNAB 🇬🇧🇪🇺🔶
So, 'download a file over Three' is a no-go, whilst 'download a file over a VPN over Three' is absolutely fine.
I don't get it.
Anyway, the camper now has a permanent VPN connection and connectivity just works.
Feb 25 at 9:44pmWeb
Show threadTim Ward ⭐🇪🇺🔶 #FBPEFeb 25

@NAB I found an utterly weird problem with accessing a home system from outside the home using giffgaff. Which didn't work, with incomprehensible error messages. But accessing the same port from outside the home using something other than giffgaff, eg someone else's wifi, worked fine.

Turned out that giffgaff were somehow, for some reason, blocking access to some combination of that particular (unusual) port number and a Duck DNS domain name and a Let's Encrypt certificate. It took several attempts to get through to a tech support person who knew that this was a thing, but then they removed the block following which it's been working fine.

So it's not unknown for mobile providers to put really weird constraints on what you would expect to be normal internet operations.

Show threadantFeb 26

@TimWardCam @NAB
I had a similar issue with Vodafone in the UK many moons ago
The trick used to be switching your mobile internet APN from "wap" to "internet" to get normal internet access.

I seem to recall other providers have something similar but what you may be able to access varys depending on what your package provides.

Show threadNAB 🇬🇧🇪🇺🔶Feb 26
@mcrmonkey @TimWardCam
This is more weird than that. I could manually download the same file (same URL) from the #homeassistant host CLI using #curl or #wget. I could manually download the file from within the container using curl. The error only happened when downloading the file within the container using wget.