Help making federation work

[girish]

@dantheman the app doesn't need to be running, it can be Stopped.

[DanTheMan]

@girish Thanks a lot for that Girish

[humptydumpty]

Even though I got Matrix and the Federation to work. My friend still can't log into my Matrix homeserver so I decided to set up NextCloud Talk and Mattermost and see which ones work best for us.

Turns out they can't connect to ANY of them from their Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge running Android 7. I ask them to log in via the web browser just to test the account itself and they log in just fine.

It's a problem logging in with the android apps only that are running on my server and the error is almost the same across them all. For Matrix/Element, if they use the Matrix homeserver, it connects just fine.

Handshake error
SSL error
or something of the sort

I found this thread on Mattermost discussing certificate issues.

Quoting user "yanuk"

I upgraded the SSL certs to RSA4096 and it now works. I’m not sure what happened and why it only affected a single phone in office. Seems unique to only that phone.

I went to ssllabs.com and ran a test and got OCSP ERROR: Exception: connect timed out for the certificate path for the app.

**** I changed the domain in the screenshot for privacy by editing the page source - PM for more info ****

The question now is how to upgrade the type of certificate that Let's Encrypt is creating and have that change be permanent when the next renewal date is up. Thoughts?

[girish]

@humptydumpty How about your mobile phone? Are you able to connect from yours and what mobile do you use?

[humptydumpty]

@girish I have an iPhone XR running iOS 14.4 and everything works fine. I also have an old Samsung (forgot the model) that is running Android 5.0 and that works fine too. It's specifically one device that my friend is using (Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge, running Android 7.0) that refuses to connect to my homeservers through the apps (Element, NextCloud Talk, MatterMost). I installed all three apps in Cloudron, connected to all of them just fine on both of my devices (ios and android). Something about that S6 Edge phone is giving us problems. Is the OCSP error I mentioned above unrelated to this connectivity issue?

[ericdrgn]

@girish Testing this new way of getting federation setup on Cloudron v6.1 what exactly are the steps using this new method? I went to my domain settings and added matrix.blahblah.com:443 to the "Matrix server location" section within the domain and federation isn't working. This is a test instance of Matrix/Synapse/Element to see how it all works now. Am I doing something wrong or are there more steps not in the documentation yet? For this particular domain I have an Element instance on connect.blahblah.com, Matrix/Synapse at matrix.blahblah.com, and Kutt on the bare domain blahblah.com. "blahblah.com" is not the actual domain. Just a placeholder here.

[girish]

@ericdrgn There is small issue that I forgot to put in the docs. Did you have the Kutt already instead before you set the "Matrix server location" ? If so, on the Cloudron dashboard, simply go to Kutt app's Location section -> Save (no need to make any changes).

After that, can you check the output of curl https://blahblah.com/.well-known/matrix/server ?

Edit: leaving a note for future readers. the issue is only for installations pre-6.1.

[ericdrgn]

@girish Would you look at that! That was it. All good now. So that updated piece is all that is needed. The new method is as easy as it seems, thanks!

[girish]

@ericdrgn Good to know, thanks for testing!

The 'save' essentially re-generates the app's nginx configuration (which has changed from the previous release).

[ericdrgn]

@girish Of course, makes sense now. Should be fairly easy for everyone moving forward.