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#142 SEB 2.4.1: Problem with WebSockets

v1.0 (example)
open
nobody
None
5
2020-11-16
2020-11-12
Georg Braun
No

Dear SEB-Team,

thank you so much for SEB. You already knew, how important it is. In the meantime, we know it, too ;-)

We have been using SEB 2.4 on Win10-64-Bit-Education during the Corona summer in combination with a Remote-Desktop-WebApp that uses websockets for data transfer. We had to add our TLS-Certificate to the SEB-config-files. After that, everything worked out very well.

During the last two weeks, we started testing with v2.4.1. We observed strange behaviour on the Win10-machines: On the same machine, some local user accounts would work just fine, but with others, we could log in into the WebApp, but the remote desktop would not be able to connect. And at the same time, we had other machines, which worked fine right from the start.

After some futher testing and log-file exploration (seb.log and the server-side of our WebApp), we found that the WebSockets that are used to do the data transfer would get closed way to early with SEB v2.4.1, while they remain open and work just fine with SEB v2.4 - even with the config file created for SEB v2.4.1.

Maybe, there are some changes in v2.4.1 that would affect WebSocket behaviour?

Many thanks and best regards,
Georg Braun
Hochschule München, Germany

Discussion

  • Daniel Schneider

    Daniel Schneider - 2020-11-16

    Hello Georg,

    It's highly unlikely that changes in SEB 2.4.1 (from 2.4) causes issues with WebSockets, as the only change in the browser engine is in this commit, which doesn't seem to have anything to do with WebSockets.

    As we are cannot develop SEB 2.x further and the embedded Firefox 52 ESR cannot be updated to a newer version, there probably isn't much that can be done.

    Do you need WebRTC or is there another reason you are not using SEB 3.1?

    Best regards,
    Daniel

     

  • Georg Braun

    Georg Braun - 2020-11-16

    Hello Daniel,

    thanks a lot for your response!

    I agree with you: The commit you highlighted does not seem to have anything to do with WebSockets.

    We dived into SEB during early summer 2020 (as many others did) and took a quick look into SEB 3.0. We felt that your roadmap change towards Chromium was a great decision (I did some CEF-Sharp projects about 2 years ago before I went off to Electron). At the same time, SEB 3.0 was not mature enough, e.g. it did not allow embedded TLS certificates which we needed for our use cases. Also, we got nervous about the Anti-Malware topic. Therefore, we decided to stay on the save side and go with the mature SEB 2.4.

    With SEB 3.1 comming out on Nov. 9, we did not have enough time to do thorough release tests, as we will be in production next week. Therefore, we thought that we will simply migrate from 2.4 to 2.4.1 and have less tests to do. In the meantime, we switched back to 2.4(.0) - all problems with WebSockets we saw with 2.4.1 where gone.

    We are still a bit nervous, since we do not understand, why it would sometimes work and sometimes not on the same win10-machine with 2.4.1 depending on which Windows-User was used. We were hunting after TCP socket restrictions or Firewall rules, but could not find any within the limited time we had. So we >>think<< that we will be safe with 2.4 just like during the summer term, but we are not absolutely sure.

    Anyway, our plans are to go with 2.4(.0) for this term ("Semester") and switch to SEB 3.x in February/March 2021.

    In the meantime, we are looking forward to your newest steps like you shown on your latest YouTube-Video and especially with the SEB-Server. You guys are great!

    One last thing (at least for this ticket): Do you prefer us opening issues on GitHub or rather here on SourceForge?

    Many thanks and best regards,
    Georg

     
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