Connecting Android clients to Windows CMS (XAMPP)

Get Help
1

We have installed the Windows CMS using XAMPP.

We have now opened our ports as advised in other threads.

How do we now connect the display to the CMS? We have tried http://// and it will not connect. Please could you explain what steps we need to follow in order to get the displays connected to the CMS?

Also - Could you please confirm which settings we need to update in the CMS and we are not using a local host.

2

It’s hard to say exactly what is required without knowing your exact setup.

Hopefully, if you have the CMS installed correctly, you now can access it on your local network at http://ip.address where ip.address is the IP address of your Windows machine. So for example something like http://192.168.0.10

If the URL you’re using includes the word web, then the CMS isn’t installed correctly, and you should correct that before proceeding.

If that’s working as expected, then you’ll need to do the following:

  • In your router, set a static reservation for that computer so that it always gets the same IP address
  • Open inbound port 80 to that IP address from the public internet in your router’s port forwarding
  • Configure a dynamic DNS service such that you have a publicly resolvable DNS name that resolves to your current public IP address - so for example, something like DynDNS offer this and might give you a name like sprinkles.dyndns-remote.com
  • Your players would then be configured to connect to http://sprinkles.dyndns-remote.com. Keep in mind you need to run their update client to keep the public IP in sync as it changes over time.
  • If you’re running a 1.8 series CMS, and have XMR running, you’ll also need to open inbound port 9505 and that should map to your server IP too.

As it’s available on the public internet, you should really secure that with HTTPS too, in which case you’ll need to close port 80 and open port 443 instead, and configure the players to talk to the https:// variant of your URL.

I’m not sure what the second part of your question relates to. What settings you set depends on how you want the CMS to function. The CMS post-installation guide stickied on the front page of the Community site is a good place to start.

3

Hi Alex,

Thanks for this - we have tried connecting to the CMS from our local network however it doesn’t link, we get the XAMPP webpage. On the server running the CMS the web address is localhost/xibo/web/admin.

As this is not running correctly and you said it needs to be, please could you advise how we get it set up correctly?

Thanks

4

The other question we have, having looked at the guide - how do we do this:

CMS Maintenance and Email Alerts
The Xibo CMS is only ever running when a user is actively interacting with the system, or a Player is connecting to update its content. At other times, Xibo isn’t running at all. That means in order to carry out certain background routines (eg clearing out old records) or to alert you if one of your Players stops connecting as expected, we need a regular “wakeup” to run Xibo to allow those things to happen. Xibo uses Tasks and XTR to run these routines. In the Cloud, or wtih Docker, running XTR will happen automatically for you.

Since there are no instructions on what to do if you are not running in the cloud or with Docker…

5

You need to ensure that XTR is run once every 1-5 minutes.

To run XTR, run c:\path\to\php-win.exe -f c:\path\to\xibo\bin\xtr.php

You’d probably need to use the Windows Scheduled Tasks to do that.

There’s no instructions there for non-Docker based installs as we don’t suggest that setup. It is however covered in the manual:

http://xibo.org.uk/manual-tempel/en/install_xtr.html

Similarly XMR is covered too:

http://xibo.org.uk/manual-tempel/en/install_xmr.html

6

If you have “web” in the URL, then your webserver is incorrectly configured. See http://xibo.org.uk/manual-tempel/en/install_environment.html

You need to adjust the web server (Apache probably) webroot to point to the web directory of the Xibo CMS install files.

If the CMS works at http://localhost but not from other computers on the same network at http://ip.address, then either you have a firewall blocking access, or the webserver you’ve setup isn’t listening on that network interface.

As it’s a custom install, I can’t know what you’ve done in either regard I’m afraid.

7

Hello,

I decided to start again and install using Docker - all is now working well!

I have connected a display which is on the same network as the CMS Server - how would I connect that display offsite in one of our shops?

At the moment I type in http://(IP ADDRESS) and the key and it works. Do I need to do anything differently to connect when the server is remote?