I have the same issue with FreePBX. I recently upgraded from 2.2.3 to 2.3.0rc1 to 2.3.0. I believe the problem lies in function module_getonlinexml in /var/www/html/admin/functions.inc.php I removed the @ from the file_get_contents function call on line 1726. After doing so and running /var/lib/asterisk/bin/module_admin listonline from the command line, I get the warning:

PHP Warning: file_get_contents(http://mirror.freepbx.org/modules-2.3.xml): failed to open stream: HTTP request failed.

What is strange is that I can ping mirror.freepbx.org AND I can wget the xml file.

This can also be down to your php configuration.

The method freepbx uses to download the modules file is via a file open command with a url as parameter. A "secure" php configuration will not permit this, so your apache php.ini would need to be modified to allow:

allow_url_fopen = On

Hello wp1998

The first thing to check is if you can get the file at all - so try

wget http://mirror.freepbx.org/modules-2.4.xml

from the freepbx server (swap 2.4 for the main version you are running).

If this works, then it eliminates dns and firewall type causes, so then you may have a permissions issue...

Are you saying that a successful wget of the xml file from the box that runs the script that downloads the same file doesn't eliminate the firewall as an issue?

How does the sonicwall filewall know that the server is running wget versus a php script?

Yeah I was aware of the sonicwall issues, but I had figured that PHP and wget would send a similar parameter set with the http get, and both be incomplete compared to a browser doing the request.

So I would have expected the wget to fail in the same way as the php "fopen with url". Perhaps wget then sends a more complete set of headers if it does work correctly.

Same problem.

I can download wget and xml file. But cannot use online admin. Any help please?

Roman

Hello tabbertmj,

Did you confirm you can do a wget of the file from the command line?

wget http://mirror.freepbx.org/modules-2.4.xml

Hello. Try this. Create a file called test.php in your htdocs directory (this may be at /usr/local/apache/htdocs, it depends on your dist):

<?php
$data = file_get_contents("http://mirror.freepbx.org/modules-2.4.xml");
echo $data;
?>

Run this from the command line and make sure you get the modules list:

php test.php

Now browse to your freepbx webserver and see if you get the modules list:

http://yourwebserveraddress/test.php

Hello Roman

If you run

php test.php

from the command line, do you get any errors?

Going even further I have another system runs on the VMware partition. I don't have an issue with online modules. I have compared following files on both systems.

httpd.config
php.ini
amportal.config

No difference in files at all. Can someone recommend what's casing the issues.

Roman

"Changing the user_agent in /etc/php.ini solves the problem.
user_agent="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)"

This also worked for me.

If you are using IPCop anywhere in your outbound links, you may have default restrictions on the user agents allowed to send requests.
If you set this to emulate IE then this is obviously a default browser.

A strange issue, but this caught me out too.

Cheers,
Jason

I'm very new at this but encountered the same problem as everyone else. Warning: Cannot connect to online repository (mirror.freepbx.org). Online modules are not available. And I have a high spped connection with a Sonicwall router. I tried to reinstall the server from scratch - same problem. I even tried to connect my Asterisk server to a router that has absolutely no firewall - same problem. Then I installed the server again - this time when I went to connect to get the module updates *** IT WORKED ***.

So I don't know why or how but it resolved the issue. When you do the original installation it must be connected to the internet and not through a Sonicwall. Or at least that's what seems to resolve the issue.

I'm sure someone with much more knowledge of Asterisk, Trixbox, and Linux can determine the reason and let us all know.

Hope this is of some help.

Like what everyone have said, it's either a Sonicwall Content Filter or DNS problem. For those of you who can ping and wget just fine but PHP cannot fopen, then you can hack /var/www/html/admin/functions.inc.php to use wget. Here's the snippet of code I added:

Add this to function module_getonlinexml near line 1725:
if ($override_xml) {
$fn = $override_xml."modules-".$matches[1].".xml";
} else {
$fn = "http://mirror/freepbx.org/modules-".$matches[1].".xml";
// echo "(From default)"; //debug
}

//************ hack starts here ************
if (file_exists('/tmp/freepbx') == false)
mkdir('/tmp/freepbx', 0774)
$modules_name = basename($fn);
system("wget $fn -O /tmp/freepbx/$modules_name");
$fn = "/tmp/freepbx/$modules_name";
//************ hack ends here ************

//$fn = "/usr/src/freepbx-modules/modules.xml";
$data = file_get_contents($fn);
$module_getonlinexml_error = empty($data);

Add this part to function module_download around 2325:
if (!($fp = @fopen($filename,"w"))) {
return array(sprintf(_("Error opening %s for writing"), $filename));
}

$headers = get_headers_assoc($url);

//******* hack starts here ***********
$dl_module = basename($url);
$system("wget $url -O /tmp/freepbx/$dl_module");
$url = "/tmp/freepbx/$dl_module";
//******* hack ends here ***********

$totalread = 0;

This is simply just a temporary solution to have PHP use the system's wget instead of fopen.

trixbox does nothing more then setup an ISO and install FreePBX as is and ironically most issues of this sort are reported by trixbox users). It is not a FreePBX issue. The closes 'culprit' that is our issue is how we pull the xml file using a php mechanism that is known to create problems with some filtering techniques such as has been mentioned by sonicwall. Some day we may investigate changing that although you would have hoped after over 2 years of the same mechanism being there, some one out in the community might have submitted a patch that uses a different http access method in php to pull those files that would get around that problem that we could look at.

as far as permissions, the real reason apache 'must' run as asterisk is because of the 600 permissions that asterisk sets (or at least used to) on some of the voicemail files. Tools like ARI would not be able to access them - group permissions don't help.
As far as using curl to fix the content filtering issues, I don't know. It has been a while since I looked at the issue, but I thought there was more than the user agent causing problems with the sonicwall content filters. Whether using curl would fix the issue, I don't know. But with curl, the user agent could also be changed to IE or FF IIRC - been a while since I did anything with Curl.

These 2 things are what solved my problem:

i finally checked Apache config using webmin - basically it was set to never do name server lookups!

So I logged into Webmin as root and went into "servers". Tried different options on Apache but neither worked. I just clicked "Apply Changes", "Stop Server" and "Start Server" to the right of the screen in that order..

After I made the hostname lookup change in Apache, I needed to apply changes. then stop and start Apache. Then it worked!!! Yay!

Great forum.

-cash

For those that are having issues although everything appears to be correct...

functions.inc.php appears to use fsockopen to initiate it's request to the site. (I'm new to freepbx, but I've worked with PHP a bit)

Natively fsockopen does not support proxying. If you are behind a web proxy then you would need to code for that, there are samples on the PHP web site under that function. If you can punch a hole in your firewall to allow the traffic then you may be fine, if not then you will need to find another method or mod the code.

Hi ,
can i configiure my in my SIP setting as when i dial on one particular extension .it sholul prompt me with a voice message saying " Press 1 for Helpdesk, Press 2 for Sales ectt...
if so how it can be done .were you find the setting for this

Thanks
Vinod

I've seen this oddity before, and I think sometimes it is caused by netconfig - hence the solution with DNS working above.

If you must use netconfig, enter the details, submint them and reboot. type netconfig and enter the details again, and reboot, then check you can check for online updates.

The problem does still occur with sonicwall firewalls, or if there is a proxy server in the way, so it may not be the solution in every case.

Alternatively, you can use the command system-config-network, and set the DNS manually.

Joe

The following fixed my issue:

On October 26th, 2007 nathan31415 (tadpole) said:

I had the same problem tonight though I have a Sonicwall TZ170 running the Enhanced OS.

The solution is described here:

http://www.radiotope.com/writing/?p=95

In short, the CFS engine is running no matter if you have a license for it or not and the firewall is dropping only the HTTP GET packet (though the earlier SYN/SYN-ACK packets go through fine). You have to manually disable the CFS engine via the undocumented http://your.ip.address/diag.html URL after logging in.

My guess is that the short HTTP GET packet causes the CFS engine to drop the packet. Wireshark showed only

HTTP GET /modules-2.3.xml HTTP/1.0\r\n

with no other accompanying parameters as you typically find when a true browser does an HTTP GET (e.g. Host:, User-Agent:, Accept:, Keep-Alive:, Connection:, Referer:, Cookie:, Authorization:, etc. etc.) followed by TCP retransmissions (since no ACK was ever received back from freepbx.org). A wget of the the URL worked just fine from the same IP address so I'm not sure what else the Sonicwall triggers on, but I was stumped (and no mention of the "...examining stream for host header" message on either sonicwall.com or mysonicwall.com that I could find, sigh).

If FreePBX faked some of the additional fields when issuing the GET I bet the packet would pass through the Sonicwall just fine. I could see a security-paranoid web proxy do the same thing too (I wonder how you could force Squid to do this?).

Nathan

Thanks bluetrepidation. That solved my problem!