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Unhelpful error message - suggest IPv6 test?

!Friendica Support

Hi folks,

I was a bit baffled by an error from friendica (which appeared to otherwise be working), complaining that .well-known/host-meta was not accessible, and that this was a "severe" problem.

BUT - clicking the link in the error resulted in seeing the host-meta downloaded.

After a bit of head scratching (I've recently moved to nginx), I figured it out.

My local internet has only IPv4 connectivity - so it worked. My nginx was misconfigured, and has been ignoring requests on IPv6.

Can I suggest that the Admin panel add an additional test for ip4 and ip6 connectivity, so that admins can be warned?

Additionally, the message about host-meta might be reworded to include a hint to check IP6 connectivity or something.

TTFN, have fun folks,

-Ian

!Friendica Support

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Michael 🇺🇦
Michael 🇺🇦  
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Your system cannot access your system from itself.
Ian Molton
Ian Molton  
yes, but the error isnt terribly helpful about that. the machine has ip6 and o does the dns - but the webserver wasnt configured properly, so the test for the host-meta file failed, but downloading it or trying to see why was confounded by the error not being visible from an ipv4 *only* client.

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Tobias
Tobias  
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Content warning: Unhelpful error message - suggest IPv6 test?

Ian Molton
Ian Molton  

Content warning: Unhelpful error message - suggest IPv6 test?

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Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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@Ian Molton This feels a little too low-level an issue for Friendica to warn admins about.

I’m not even even sure we have information from the PHP script to even show the relevant warning message.

@Ian Molton
Tobias
Tobias  
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I think it would be possible @Hypolite Petovan to get the DNS record of the baseurl and then do something with that information. And getting this information into the admin panel might be a niceexercise as it is separated from the complexity of most Friendica features.

PHP: dns_get_record - Manual

www.php.net
@Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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@Tobias We can check whether there's both an IPv4 and an IPv6 addresses attached to a given domain but I don't think we can test further. We need to perform an HTTP request based on the domain, not based on the IP address, because of virtual hosts.
@Tobias
Ian Molton
Ian Molton  

I think just adding a comment to the existing error message like

"this error may be caused by incorrect DNS configuration, lack of ipv4 or 6 connectivity, or take to enable ipv6 on the webserver"

Would be sufficient. A DNS check would be a nice addition though.

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Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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@Ian Molton @Tobias We can definitely update the error message.
@Ian Molton @Tobias
Ian Molton
Ian Molton  

*shrug*

Caught me out.

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