Webinar Plugin question

[Allen_Miller]

I'm interested to find if anyone has 3CX instance(s) hosted on DigitalOcean and using the 3CX Wordpress Webinar Plugin and is it presently operating correctly?
Allen

 

[Allen_Miller]

I've solved my dilemma. In case it might help someone else here is my last update to the 3CX support ticket. ..

I had the webinar plugin working for 2 years or so. Recently I found it wasn't working. It was pointed out that my FQDN was specifying port 5001 but in the Wordpress Plugin I did not have the port. I added the port there but I continued to get the error.In the last couple of months I moved my server from OVH hosting to DigitalOcean hosting. I think what happened was - my server had been set to use 443 but when I ran the install on DigitalOcean I wasn't thinking and just accepted the default of 5001. Maybe the after the fact adding the 5001 in the plugin config wasn't doing all that was needed?The final thing I just tried was - I recreated my 3CX server from a backup and changed the port so it was not 5001 and was back to 443. I made a new plugin and wahla (really voila) no more error.

 

[MarcelloV]

Hi @Allen_Miller, thanks for sharing your experience. To help troubleshooting the 3CX Webinar plugin, there is a "Test API Request" button. By clicking the button, the plugin attempts to contact the PBX to verify that configuration is correct.

It's important that the "3CX Public HTTPS URL" configuration does match the PBX URL, including the port. So, if you configured the PBX on port 5001, it must include port 5001. On the other hand, if you configured the PBX on port 443 (default HTTPS) you can omit the port.

DigitalOcean provides a firewall for your virtual machines: ensure that PBX port (443 or 5001) is correctly opened for the plugin to operate correctly.

 

[Allen_Miller]

Hi Marcello,
I got a success result when I used the Test API button. And my PBX URLs did match, including the port. And the DigitalOcean permitted the traffic on both ports. Still my website with the short code returned an error where it had been working for the previous 2 years.
Allen

 

[MarcelloV]

Hi @Allen_Miller , the PBX configuration is separated for each webinar form, to allow multiple PBXs on a single website if needed. The curl error you reported (Webinar API error: cURL error 7: Failed to connect to xxxxxxxxxx.3cx.us port 443 after 292 ms: Couldn't connect to server) indicates that the Wordpress plugin cannot contact the PBX on port 443.
This can happen for a number of reasons:

- Firewall on the PBX blocking requests
- Outdated crypto libraries on Wordpress server
- Misconfigured PBX URL
- PHP version too old / missing security modules
- DNS issues on Wordpress server
- Plugin bug
- Network issues between Wordpress server and PBX server (routing, poor network performance)

In your case the plugin was configured to contact the PBX on port 443: if you switched hosting from OVH to DigitalOcean and during restore you configured port 5001, the plugin stopped working in that moment for sure, because the port did not match anymore.

In this situation you can:
- reconfigure the existing webinar form, changing the PBX URL from https://yourpbx.3cx.us to https://yourpbx.3cx.us:5001
- reconfigure the PBX, changing the listening port from 5001 to 443

When you changed hosting, also your PBX IP has changed: if your Wordpress is hosted on some dedicated provider, while 3CX updates your IP immediately, it could take up to 24/48 hours for the DNS to update if the provider has some DNS caching. In this case, requests from Wordpress would have failed because the DNS on Wordpress server was resolving to the wrong server IP.

Test API button sends *exactly* the same request sent by plugin to get webinar data, using actual webinar form configuration. If Test API button reports OK, the webinar plugin is able to contact the PBX.
One more clarification: when your click the Test API button, current onscreen configuration is validated and saved, then the API request is sent.

One more detail: some Wordpress caching plugins might interfere with webinar form update, showing an old page. In this case, you could have correctly updated the plugin configuration, Test API request is not cached and returns ok, but the website page still show the (cached) error page. We suggest to exclude from caching our webinar plugin, to ensure fresh data is always displayed. Check your cache plugin documentation for the correct configuration.

 

[Allen_Miller]

Hi @MarcelloV

Thanks for the information. I appreciate it.

Allen