I have a problem with one of our customer’s CMS, or more specifically, the connection from the android clients to the CMS.
I’m still using the 1.7 CMS and it has been working fine ever since i installed it. The four client screens (FireTVs) are using the R62 of the android version, if i recall correctly - i was reluctant to update them, as i am not sure if they are still compatible? (maybe you can shed some light on that topic for me as well…)
Please see attached the error status screens from the client:
As you can see, it’s struggling to connect - i have completely reinstalled Xibo on the client and did the full setup again, connecting it to the cms with a fresh license. For some reason, on the “Connect to CMS” screen, it sometimes displayed “Unable to connect to CMS” and sometimes just worked - the display is correctly registered in the CMS now (again) but still displays the errors on the log.
Is there something wrong with the network? Could it be some firewall problem? I’m stuck and i don’t know what to do from here (besides contacting their IT professional, asking if they made any changes whatsoever…)
It definitely looks like connection problem, it does not seem to be refused all the time (obviously), but something seems to be blocking / interrupting the connection between player and that CMS.
All other errors are most likely caused by the connection problem ie player can’t correctly download all content/schedule from CMS including module files it seems (missing dependencies).
It will retry the connection each collection interval, but if it can’t reach it or if it’s interrupted in the middle of the download then that can’t work reliably I’m afraid.
1.7 players should only need 80/443 for http/https access to the CMS.
What Android version are they using?
Certainly that’s not a device that we would recommend, but I doubt the issue is with the device itself unless the network connection is failing on it, then that’s a hardware issue.
Peter, thank you for the reply and your kind help - much appreciated!
The devices worked fine so far, the network connection is fine and i can browse other apps that require an internet connection - as it doesn’t connect internally to a server, it should be working. But i will try to find out, if a firewall is blocking anything.
Is SSL connection via Https required, or can it connect “unsecurely” as well? I would need to set up a secure connection first, if that is part of the problem…
Is there anything else i can try in the meantime? Anything CMS or server related? It runs on an apache web-server
The CMS has an option to force https in CMS settings, you can try to disable that (if it is enabled) and then connect player over http.
Of course generally it is highly recommended to use https connections, but as a test you can certainly try that.
You can also double check the date&time and timezone on the device, as that could potentially cause problems as well if it’s really far off.
You could also perhaps have a look at apache logs and see if it shows any connection attempts as blocked or blacklisted etc
If there is proxy or firewall in place, could be good to double check that they are not inteferring with player<->cms connection
Okay, i will try to find out what’s causing the connection troubles - because according to the customer, nothing has been changed to the configuration.
I saw in the logs, that for some reason it is now connecting to [URLofCMS]//xmds.php - does the double slash cause any problems? Because there was only a single slash before - but when i entered the CMS adress without the trailing slash, it didn’t connect…
