Hi Frank,
Hi Clemens,
I have to admit that I have been running out of ideas why the wiki cannot get a connection while "curl" can.
One last try: has the gateway connecting the local network to the internet an application firewall or the like ? Something that sniffs user-agents for http connections and only allows "known ones" ?
Not to my knowledge, but see below
The java client used by the XWiki installation wizard might be emulated with:
curl --user-agent "history" http://extensions.xwiki.org
bad info given by me here, sorry; it should read: curl --user-agent "XWikiExtensionManager" http://extensions.xwiki.org anyway, this seems not to be the problem ... because the other bogus user agent works as well:
$ curl --user-agent "history" http://extensions.xwiki.org <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN"> <html><head> <title>302 Found</title> </head><body> <h1>Found</h1> <p>The document has moved <a href="http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome">here</a>.</p> </body></html> $
if this works, too, I have to admit I have no clue why it does not work. (Btw, there should be an error message in the log files. Is there anything like that?)
In fact, there is a single error being printed to logs/catalina.out /after/ I click the "continue" button in the first step of the Distribution Manager:
[...] 2016-01-28 13:36:53,762 [Active Installs Ping Thread] WARN a.i.c.ActiveInstallsPingThread - Failed to send Active Installation ping to [http://extensions.xwiki.org/activeinstalls]. Error = [ConnectException: Connection timed out]. Will retry in [86400] seconds... [...]
I don't know what an "Active Installation ping" is, but in fact while I seem to be able to access this webpage:
$ curl http://extensions.xwiki.org/activeinstalls { "status" : 200, "name" : "Bobster", "version" : { "number" : "1.1.1", "build_hash" : "f1585f096d3f3985e73456debdc1a0745f512bbc", "build_timestamp" : "2014-04-16T14:27:12Z", "build_snapshot" : false, "lucene_version" : "4.7" }, "tagline" : "You Know, for Search" } $
I cannot `ping` it:
$ ping extensions.xwiki.org PING www.xwiki.org (104.31.71.57) 56(84) bytes of data. ^C --- www.xwiki.org ping statistics --- 76 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 75445ms
$
Does the Distribution Manager execute a real "ping" command even though the webpages are accessible? And if yes, how can I avoid this? I doubt that our networking dept. will adapt any gateway configuration to to make a single software installation possible :-}
No, there is no ping or such; well, it relies on the library: "HTTP Components": https://hc.apache.org/ to do the job. I have to admit that I do not know exactly if this library does or does not send a ping first, but I do not think it does. Even if it were so, it is not the case of the problem, as I cannot ping extensions.xwiki.org either, and install works from here. The "timeout" error message seems to indicate that the connection never gets an error but is simply dropped somewhere. I do not think extensions.xwiki.org drops the connection - as you can get there via curl ... Any chance the application server uses some proxy settings, as described at the following link, but they happen to be incorrect? http://platform.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/AdminGuide/Installation#HRunningXWi... That might explain the timeout despite the server being able to reach the installation repositories normally (i.e. via curl). I have to admit that if it is not the proxy-settings then I am getting somewhat desperate about how to diagnose the problem. I guess one could try to get stack traces from the server while it is starting up and use the java option "-Djavax.net.debug=all" (dumps lots of stuff to the standard output) to see if it tries to open connections to extensions.xwiki.org but I guess all one can get from that is that the server opens connections and then it waits till timeout ... If you just want to get the server running with a proper UI anyway, I have written up a little HowTo : http://platform.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/AdminGuide/FillLocalMavenRepository To use it, one needs to install + configure maven, however ... I am still using maven 3.0.4 from http://archive.apache.org/dist/maven/maven-3/3.0.4/binaries/apache-maven-3.0... but to just donwload the UI-packages any version of 3.x should "just work". Clemens