Cannot connect to Peer

Cannot connect to Peer

by Michael Harrison -
Number of replies: 14

Hello All, I have posted this before in another thread but have had no answer!

I am working in a school that is keen to get this networking between moodles working, however after following all documentation I keep getting this error whilst going from SiteA to Site B

"You do not have permission to begin a remote session."


If I click continue I get put into the login screen of the other school, and I am not logged in!

I keep getting this error whilst going from SiteB to Site A

RPC auth/mnet/user_authorise:ERROR 0:0:

I am running Moodle 1.8.2+ and Moodle 1.8.2+ for my two instances on the same server. 

Both Instances are using LDAP Authentication as well ad Moodle Network


Please If anyone has an answer to this please help, I am getting to the desperate stage! If you know how Mnet works please let me know then I can begin tests myself!

Thanks in advance for any help!!

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In reply to Michael Harrison

Re: Cannot connect to Peer

by Donal McMullan -
Hi Michael - it sounds as though you need to give your local users the permission to roam to remote Moodle sites. By default, I think only admins can do this

Edit one of your site's roles, and give it the capability to roam to remote Moodles... if you want to be lazy, you can grant it to all logged-in users. Then make sure the users who need to SSO inhabit that role.

Good luck - Donal
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In reply to Donal McMullan

RPC enrol/mnet/available_courses:ERROR 7:couldn't connect to hostRe: Cannot connect to Peer

by Michael Harrison -

Hi Donal

I have done what you suugested but I am still getting those same errors, I am also getting this error when I try to enrol a course into moodle site B.

RPC enrol/mnet/available_courses:ERROR 7:couldn't connect to host

and this error on moodle SITE A

RPC enrol/mnet/available_courses:ERROR 1:Payload not encrypted

hope anyone can help,

It would also be useful if anyone can tell me if this is a firewall issue!

Also SITE A is on https, whilst SITE B is on http, does this affect it????

Thanks

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In reply to Michael Harrison

Re: RPC enrol/mnet/available_courses:ERROR 7:couldn't connect to hostRe: Cannot connect to Peer

by Michael Harrison -

Hi all,

I have deleted both peers in both sites and added them again, however when I added them i got this message

Public key Help with this There was a problem retrieving the public key.

I am now beginning to wonder if it is a firewall, or some other connectivity issue. Both sites are on a strictly controlled network, so i would need to know if any other ports are involved.

Infact it would help if someone could explain exactly how the two peers talk to each other, once I know this I can then begin to get our networks changed to enable this fantastic moodle feature.

Thanks

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In reply to Michael Harrison

Re: RPC enrol/mnet/available_courses:ERROR 7:couldn't connect to hostRe: Cannot connect to Peer

by Donal McMullan -
  1. I don't think it's a firewall issue. If each machine can retrieve a web page from the other, that's all MNet needs. It looks like you were originally able to exchange keys between Moodles, so this really doesn't look like a problem.
  2. If your Moodles are running on the same host, can you check that they're using different Moodledata directories (in config.php)
  3. 'Payload not encrypted' can often mean that a PHP error has occurred on the host that sent the payload, and an error report was injected into the XML. Check your PHP error log for clues.
  4. If one site is on HTTP and the other on HTTPS, things should work as normal. I haven't tested this much, but it ought to work.
  5. How do the sites talk to each other? They exchange XML over the normal web service. There's nothing special to enable - if your machines are serving web pages, and PHP has the XML-RPC, CURL and OpenSSL extensions installed, you should be good to go. These are all pretty common - you can check if your Moodles have these available by visiting /admin/environment.php

Anything in your error logs Michael?
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In reply to Donal McMullan

Re: RPC enrol/mnet/available_courses:ERROR 7:couldn't connect to hostRe: Cannot connect to Peer

by Larry Mahony -
I'm having a similar problem
I've set up networking on my 2 servers, enabled all the options as per the docs
Yet when I click on the link from the network servers block it gives an error after it gets to the other site

I'm running one with 1.8.3 and 1.8.2 - would they have to be the same versions of moodle?

When i try connect into the 1.8.3 one it says "You do not have permission to begin a remote session"
When i try connect into the 1.8.2 one it says "RPC auth/mnet/user_authorise:ERROR 0:0:"

Also for some reason when i log in as student - i can't see the network servers block even though its been added to the front page. I enabled the roam option in the student role.


Average of ratings: Useful (1)
In reply to Larry Mahony

Re: RPC enrol/mnet/available_courses:ERROR 7:couldn't connect to hostRe: Cannot connect to Peer

by Ali Hastie -

Hi Larry

Did you ever find the solution to your problem as we are having the exact problems you have stated? We have two Moodle version 1.9.3

Ali

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In reply to Ali Hastie

Re: RPC enrol/mnet/available_courses:ERROR 7:couldn't connect to hostRe: Cannot connect to Peer

by Klaus Pieslinger -
Ali, please have a look at this http://docs.moodle.org/en/Upgrading_to_Moodle_1.8#Roles_and_capabilities and see if it solves your issue.
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In reply to Klaus Pieslinger

Re: RPC enrol/mnet/available_courses:ERROR 7:couldn't connect to hostRe: Cannot connect to Peer

by Mark Wilfan -

Hi all

I work at the same school as Mike Harrison (he's my boss smile) and i just thought I would add my bit to this and tell you where we are now

We made the decision to move from windows/iis to centos/apache as we had successfully got 2 moodle instances to talk on a centos box.

I migrated our instance over (we'll call that site A) and make a brand new instance to use as a public VLE (Site B)

I still ran into problems with this configuration and found that to fix it I had to take a look at the database table mdl_mnet_host and correct the url for entry id 1 which is your own moodle. We had to do this as we migrated our moodle from one url to another and the entry was wrong. This would also apply to people who install moodle on a test server to play around with then migrate to a production server I suppose.

The next problem we had the pulled up the you do not have permissions blah blah error was to do with our wwwroot and https. Even though we had set https only for login the site would stay in https for users after login. We are pretty sure this is because of something our ISA server is doing as we are running in masquerading mode behind a firewall. Even though I created the networking key whilst in https mode we would still get that error. I found that if you change the url manually to http all worked perfectly. Site A users could roam to Site B and I could enrol them from our instance remotely.

We decided to cut our losses and change the wwwroot to https and run in secure only mode. I regenerated the key in networking, deleted the partnerships and restablished them. Now everything is all sorted.... for us!

We have 2 other schools that need to roam to our public site as we are hosting a Virtual Reading group for our federation of schools. 1 schools moodle seems to connect fine and users can roam to our public VLE but they cannot enrol users remotely. When you try to you get the good old RPC message

enrol/mnet/available_courses:ERROR 7:couldn't connect to host

The other site the time is skewed so until their peeps sort this I cannot check roaming but we get the same error 7 message when enrolling remotely...

I'm hoping it is something to do with the what I described at the top with urls in the database but can't be certain

just for info though if you do need to do a find and replace in the database, for example after a url change, try the tool in the admin folder of your moodle. /admin/replace.php

works a treat but backup before ;) just in case

oh the joys!

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In reply to Mark Wilfan

Re: RPC enrol/mnet/available_courses:ERROR 7:couldn't connect to hostRe: Cannot connect to Peer

by Nigel McNie -
Hi,

Yes, moving your site to a different URL will break things. SSL keys are generated for a specific hostname, so you can't just ship the database to a new URL and have it work. Likewise, you had the problem with the wwwroot in the host table for your local host.

Moving wwwroot when using MNET is a tricky business because of these issues. You _certainly_ have to regenerate the SSL keys, and you _probably_ have to look around in the db and fix the wwwroot for the host idenitified by $CFG->mnet_localhost_id.

PeterB and I came up with a plan to ditch that particular row out of the host table, but neither of us have had time to implement it, or even file a bug for it I think. Though even if that was fixed, you'd still need to delete the keys when moving wwwroot, which I don't think is mentioned in the documentation when it should be.

BTW: the couldn't connect to host message is a http level thing, are you sure that you're trying to connect to the right host/port, that firewalling isn't in the way etc?
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In reply to Donal McMullan

Re: RPC enrol/mnet/available_courses:ERROR 7:couldn't connect to hostRe: Cannot connect to Peer

by Michael Harrison -

Hello All,

Sorry for leaving this one for so long!!! I hope everyone had a good Christmas and New Year!!!

Anyway

Donal! I cannot answer your question about error logs because I don;t know which ones you mean! I have checked for a PHP error log and not found one, where are they usually found, in the PHP folder??

Do we need certain versions of OpenSSl,CURL or PHP?

Do we need anything setup in IIS for CURL OpenSSL or PHP for this to work??

Is there any file permissions to worry about?

Sorry for all the questions but I am desperate to get this sorted!!!

Thanks

Thanks

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In reply to Michael Harrison

Re: RPC enrol/mnet/available_courses:ERROR 7:couldn't connect to hostRe: Cannot connect to Peer

by Mike Chambers -

Hi Everyone, I have been testing this module too, and so far no luck.

The current setup is as follows:

Previous tests were in Moodle 1.9 beta 2 (upgraded today to beta 3 although it states that its actually beta 4?!)

  • Running on a LAMP Setup with:
  • Suse Enterprise Linux inet 2.6.16.46-0.12
  • PHP 5.1.2
  • Apache 2.2.3
  • MySQL 5.0.26

All other moodle environment/server checks are green and state ok (openssl, curl, etc...). Implemented using virtual hosts with different IP addresses on the same network (a10.3.0.61 & b10.3.0.62); with seperate data directories and cookie sessions. MNET was setup using the instructions on moodle docs, and most roles have been setup to allow roaming capability

  • When I'm logged in (as admin) to site:a/b and attempt to go to site:b/a You do not have permission to begin a remote session. on continue I'am led to site:b/a but not logged in.
  • Whenever I click on the host within the enrolment section I get RPC enrol/mnet/available_courses:ERROR 1:Payload not encrypted
  • I've been through the threads in the network forum these errors (and a few more) seem to appear quite a bit. I've worked through most of the suggestions but I'am still encountering errors...

It seems that people have got this feature to work so any more tips/solutions would be greatly appreciated.

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In reply to Mike Chambers

Re: RPC enrol/mnet/available_courses:ERROR 7:couldn't connect to hostRe: Cannot connect to Peer

by Michael Harrison -

Hello

Is anyone going to help Myself and Mike Regarding this problem????

Thanks

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In reply to Michael Harrison

Re: RPC enrol/mnet/available_courses:ERROR 7:couldn't connect to hostRe: Cannot connect to Peer

by Ann Adamcik -
We have the same issues here, between1.9beta4 and 1.8.4+ installations on the same server. We're also using LDAP authentication. I wonder if Moodle networking doesn't play well with LDAP...
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In reply to Ann Adamcik

Re: RPC enrol/mnet/available_courses:ERROR 7:couldn't connect to hostRe: Cannot connect to Peer

by Michael Spall -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Testers
We can confirm that LDAP auth was our issue. When we moved MNET above LDAP in authentication failthrough order we stopped having this problem.
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