Jambox is great & URL relay question

[chrisclev]

Firstly - thank you so much to Kevin. Jambox is totally awesome. I built one a few weeks ago and have been using it exclusively for Jamulus since then. It works so well. It’s been quite a topic of discussion in the Jamulus Facebook group recently. My online band practice just got even easier!

Enthused I built and configured another one for a fellow band mate and posted it to him. When he tried to connect to urlrelay.com/go he gets the error message ‘New connection was rejected with the reason: Either username was not recognised , or the password was incorrect’. It worked fine at my house.

Now installed at his house I can connect using the VNC Viewer app. I was just wondering if:

1. I should have set the NODE_ID to be different (I assumed not because at his house it would be the only Jambox on his LAN).
2. Somehow urlrelay has registered the Jambox to me using keys so he can’t connect?

All help much appreciated as I plan to build at least 4 of these because they are so easy to use. Thanks in advance.

[kdoren]

I haven't heard that problem reported before.
What is his external IP? (try https://www.whatismyip.com )
Did he get the noVNC screen?

The message you describe:
New connection was rejected with the reason: Either username was not recognised , or the password was incorrect
is not from urlrelay (which is really just a mailbox for the RPi to hand its url as a redirect to your browser. There are some possible error messages (in JSON format) but that is not one of them.

If there is only a single box registered with urlrelay for his router's source IP, it doesn't matter what the NODE_ID is. You only need to change it & use it if you have multiple boxes on the same local network. There are no keys.

Things to try:
1, make sure he is using the correct URL: urlrelay.com/go (problem could be a simple typo)
2. try https url: https://urlrelay.com/go (cloudfront should redirect from http but maybe something is interfering)
3. try http://jambox.local:6080?password=jambox
4. If you know the internal IP, try: http://xx.xx.xx.xx:6080?password=jambox
5. could his pc have some software installed that is interfering? try a different browser.

[chrisclev]

Thanks for the quick response and the suggestions. I will get investigating and let you know the outcome.

[chrisclev]

• Hi Kevin. We tried all 5 of your ideas and they didn't work. I then slept on it and the next day thought that the only difference was that before I shipped it I changed the password to a 9 letter word LemonPiCC (a play on the name of my band). So the next day I connected via VNC Viewer and changed the password back to jambox. It all kicked into life and worked using urlrelay.com/go. He was able to connect from his Mac and iPhone and so was very happy - particularly as the Raspberry Pi has dropped his latency from 35 ms to 25ms! Thanks so much for your support. Is this possibly a bug?

[kdoren]

@chrisclev Presumably you're referring to the VNC password (i.e. not the SSH password).

urlrelay.com issues a redirect to your Raspberry Pi's local URL. urlrelay.com gets the local url from the urlrelay service running on the Raspberry Pi.

The urlrelay service constructs the url using the box's local IP, plus any additional arguments, which it gets from the parameter "URL_ARGS" in the file /etc/urlrelay/urlrelay.conf. default value is: URL_ARGS=/?password=jambox, because this only works on the same local network (i.e. inside your house) so for most people the convenience of not having to type a password outweighs any security concerns.

If you change the VNC password but leave URL_ARGS set to the old password, the redirect will fail because your browser will be trying to login with the wrong password.

If you change the VNC password (vncpasswd command), that's presumably because you want users to enter the password. In this case, you can comment out the URL_ARGS ( #URL_ARGS=/?password=jambox ) or set it to empty ( URL_ARGS= ).

You could also change the URL_ARGS to your new password, but if you do that it will just behave the same as with the old password,

FYI if you make any changes to /etc/urlrelay/urlrelay.conf, you'll need to the the urlrelay service to re-register, you can do this by rebooting, or with sudo systemctl restart urlrelay

[chrisclev]

Thanks Kevin now I understand the behaviour fully. I did change the VNC password from default but was unaware of the configuration file argument. Might it be a good
idea to put a couple of sentences about this in the overview for others? Eg if you change the password from default please be aware that... etc.
Your support and the Jambox setup you have created is awesome. Much appreciated!