Cannot connect to infinoted with gobby

Support
1

Problem Description
Cannot connect to Infinoted on my FreedomBox with Gobby.

Steps to Reproduce

  1. In Gobby I select “Connect to server”.
  2. I enter the domain name (e.g., myfbx.server.edu). I tried both with and without https://.

Results
The connection times out.

Information

  • FreedomBox version: 20.5
  • How did you install FreedomBox?: ‘apt install freedombox’ on Debian GNU/Linux Bullseye.
  • Diagnostics: All results show passed.
2

If your FreedomBox is connected behind a router, please update the router configuration to forward the port 6523 (TCP) to the FreedomBox’s IP address.

I just tried using Gobby, it worked for me as expected. Please don’t try https:// as infinoted/gobby does not work over HTTP protocol, it has it’s own protocol.

3

The server is a virtual server set up at my university’s servers by the systems administrator. I have not needed to open any ports until now, and the diagnostics say, among other things:

Port infinoted-plinth (6523/tcp) available for external networks

Any suggestions?

4

It may be that system administrators are allowing usual HTTP/HTTPS traffic but blocked other traffic to that server via their hardware firewalls. This is not unusual in Universities. If HTTP/HTTPS is working, you will have web interface based services working but others such as OpenVPN, etc. will be failing. That diagnostics result just checks if firewalld has properly opened the ports on FreedomBox’s side. It does not check reachability from external sources. I suggest you check with system administrators on whether they are blocking traffic on port 6523. One small check you can do is open SSH tunnel to FreedomBox machine to check if the daemon setup is okay:

ssh -L 6523:localhost:6523 fbxadmin@fbxdomainname

This will open a tunnel from local machine port 6523 to 6523 port on FreedomBox via SSH protocol. Keep that shell alive and then in Gobby, simply connect to localhost you should be able to edit documents. This is also worst case scenario for all users to do when you can’t get the admins to open ports.

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