the fast, reliable localhost tunneling solution


Troubleshooting Common Problems

By Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson 2021-05-13, 15:47

Contents

Common XAMPP and Apache issues

"It Works" But There Is No Content

If the website at YOU.pagekite.me displays the Apache welcome page, but you cannot access any content, you may need to edit your virtual host configuration to recognize your PageKite name as well as the localhost default.

In some cases, adding these lines to httpd-vhosts.conf may help:

ServerName YOU.pagekite.me
ServerAlias localhost

(Replace the default ServerName settings with these lines.)

In other cases, you may have installed a 3rd party application which has it's own configuration file and a VirtualHost directive which does not match your kite name.

On Linux, the following command may help find some clues:

$  grep -r -e VirtualHost -e ServerName /etc/{apache2,httpd}

Common CMS issues

Cannot access sub-folders, CSS, images do not display.

Similar to the above issue, CMSs such as WordPress and Status.net may also be providing local URLs instead of your PageKite URL. This addressing this is system-dependent, in Status.net it is the

$config['site']['server']

variable in statusnet/config.php.

Troubleshooting SSL encryption

Encryption doesn't work!

.pagekite.me sites

If your website's URL ends in .pagekite.me, then you should be able to use the service's wildcard SSL encryption without any extra effort. However, note that this will only work for pages with exactly two dots in the domain name. So these names are fine:

  • foo.pagekite.me
  • sub-foo.pagekite.me

But these will not work:

  • sub.foo.pagekite.me
  • sub.bar.foo.pagekite.me

Other domain names

If your website's name does not end in .pagekite.me, then you will need to provide an SSL certificate of your own and rely on your users to have modern browsers which support the SNI extension of the TLS protocol.

Recent versions of the following browsers are known to work:

  • Firefox
  • Chrome
  • Safari
  • Internet Explorer
  • curl

The following are do not properly support SNI and will not be able to visit your encrypted site:

  • All browsers on Windows XP, except Chrome - Chrome may work
  • Konqueror
  • wget

Encrypted pages are still considered insecure

If you visit an https:// page and get a security warning or the lock icon appears to be "broken", it may be because you are including images, javascript or CSS from unencrypted sources. Browsers will not consider a page secure unless all elements on the page come from secure sources.

To check if this is the case, you can use the "view source" feature of your browser and search for http://. If it is found in any src= attributes, you will have this problem.

Sub-pages are not encrypted

Some popular software packages, including Wordpress, used hard-coded URLs and may redirect users away from the encrypted site if they have been configured with a normal http:// URL string.

Double check the settings of your software and make sure that all URL paths are configured to use the secure https:// scheme.

"The page isn't redirecting properly" error in browser

It is common for web sites with their own SSL/TLS support to attempt to redirect users which access insecure versions of the site. This can in turn clash with the .pagekite.me, wild-card based encryption, causing an infinite loop of redirection that never successfully completes.

This is because when using the PageKite wild-card certificate, only the connection from the browser to the PageKite front-end relay is encrypted, the traffic seen by your local web-server is plain-text HTTP (although the PageKite connection itself is encrypted, your web server has no way of knowing that).

This problem can be resolved in two ways:

  1. Disable the redirection in your web application
  2. Use your own SSL certificate and configure PageKite accordingly

If you already have a local SSL certificate (some systems, such as Yunohost may generate one for you) and an HTTPS-enabled web server on port 443, you can implement solution 2) like so:

pagekite.py --add 443 https://yourkite.pagekite.me/

This will add an HTTPS kite to your ~/.pagekite.rc configuration. If your configuration is in /etc/pagekite.d, then you should instead add a line like this to /etc/pagekite.d/80_httpd.rc:

service_on = https:@kitename : localhost:80 : @kitesecret

Troubleshooting .deb or .rpm Installations

If you are having trouble configuring your integrated Debian or RedHat package, take a look at the troubleshooting section on the ConfigureYourSystem page.

Comments

  1. Chad said on 2012-08-14, 18:23
    I've been able to get my pagekite.me connected to my web server which is hosting a DotNetNuke website.

    Styles don't load, though, as well as images. Not sure how to resolve this issue.

    Any suggestions would be terrific!

    Logged on locally from the web server, everything works just fine.
    Permalink
  2. Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson said on 2012-08-14, 19:43
    Hi Chad! It is hard to say exactly what is going on without more details, but I recommend using something like Firebug to see which requests are actually being made. If a site is not carefully designed using only relative URLs, it's not uncommon for links to break when displayed over PageKite because PageKite does not modify the contents of the HTML documents in any way.

    This can be a fair bit of work, but the silver lining is that once you have your local site working flawlessly over PageKite, it will be much easier to actually deploy to a production server (absolute links etc. are a very common problem on newly deployed sites).
    Permalink
  3. Chad said on 2012-08-15, 14:18
    Ok, thanks for the suggestion!

    I'll get cooking with Firebug to see what requests may not be coming through. Hopefully I can clean some things up and get it working. :)
    Permalink
  4. kevin lausen said on 2012-10-21, 07:59
    I am helping a friend get an IBM jazz server w/ a few trial web apps published to the web, so he can do his homework... works fine on https://{localhost}:9443/jts I am going to try un-installing(curl-method) in the morning, re-installing w/ another one of my e-mail addresses, but any help would be HUGE.....
    Thanks a million
    Permalink
  5. Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson said on 2012-10-22, 02:11
    Kevin, without knowing what the symptoms are, there's not much we can say, sorry. But given the setup you've described, a command like this should work:

    $ pagekite.py 9443 yourname.pagekite.me

    The site should then become visible as http://yourname.pagekite.me/

    If only the front page is visible and links don't work, or javascript/CSS doesn't seem to be loading properly, you may need to review the settings of the webapp and make sure it isn't generating absolute URLs, or worst case update the configuration so it uses the pagekite name instead of localhost:9443 for links.
    Permalink
  6. Steve B said on 2014-02-02, 12:48
    cannot connect at all today, been patchy recently
    windows 7 m/c
    Permalink
  7. Reima K said on 2015-04-14, 08:48
    I got wordpress working when i added this to wpconfig.php:

    define('WP_HOME', 'http://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . '');

    define('WP_SITEURL', 'http://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . '');


    This way the home and siteurl are made automatically, and you can access the site through localhost and pagekite without changing settings. Makes everything a bit slow though, but you can have the localhost or lan ip in the database wp_options, and comment the above lines when you don't need the pagekite.
    Permalink
  8. Duane said on 2015-05-12, 12:38
    Seems to work fine when it is connected. Currently it tries to connect but disconnects... there is a line say duplicate?

    any ideas
    Permalink
  9. Matt said on 2016-01-13, 02:07
    Re Adding HTTPS to config file:

    service_on = https:@kitename : localhost:80 : @kitesecret

    this should say:

    service_on = https:@kitename : localhost:443 : @kitesecret

    Beware cut and paste.. has wasted me hours trying track down why it wasnt working.
    Permalink
  10. Jeremy said on 2016-08-02, 03:28
    Hello, I'm on OS X El Capitan and no matter what kite I try to add on the trial, it tells me that the kite creation failed because the domain is unavailable. It worked the first time around, when registering, but I realized i typed in the wrong local host port, and it since stopped working. All help would be appreciated.
    Permalink
  11. Alex said on 2016-08-14, 17:37
    Hi there,

    I also have trouble launching the kites, where 2-3 days ago on trial everything worked fine.

    Error says : pagekite.py [down] Disconnected from : http://88.198.105.37:443/

    Any help would be appreciated as I got addicted as it allows me to learn mobile development while having a backend to use at the same time.
    Permalink
  12. WilsonLiu said on 2016-08-18, 02:53
    Hello, I set up website on tomcat, and it's running fine,and the pagekite.py was flying well. but I cannot access to it via http://you.pagekite.me:8080, it always shows :Templrarily Unavaiable. I tried that on some servers,it not worked neither. Does anyone encounter it ? any help would be appreciated. thanks a million.
    Permalink
  13. JJ said on 2017-08-20, 22:31
    My problem is similar to WilsonLiu's, I think. On a Raspberry Pi I can launch pagekite ~/Public mySiteName.pagekite.me . And, I get a set-up message along with a Front-End IP and [connect] yet online I only see the Temporarily Unavailable message box.
    Permalink
  14. tyeth said on 2017-12-08, 12:47
    If yours is hanging at connecting to the frontend servers, like mine is, check the blog.
    Permalink
  15. Venkateswaran K said on 2019-01-21, 10:30
    Pagekite is working in my host machine.
    But it shoots 503 error from all other machine when request is made
    Please let us know what went wrong
    Permalink
  16. Sean Miller said on 2019-04-13, 21:17
    I'm using pagekite to explore using Alexa on a Raspberry Pi. It appears after 5 hits, my pagekite service has to be reset on the Pi by killing the process and it restarting. Is there a limitation?
    Permalink
  17. Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson said on 2019-05-03, 17:33
    Yes, please see: https://pagekite.net/2018-07-18/Phish... - we have to rate-limit incoming connections to avoid abuse. You can contact us (send an e-mail) to get the limits lifted.
    Permalink
  18. some guy said on 2020-03-28, 15:55
    There is a cure for

    SyntaxError: Missing parentheses in call to 'exec'

    somewhere. I remember seeing it. It involved using Python 2. But I don't see it in any of the usual places.

    Maybe it should be.
    Permalink
  19. Serkosky said on 2020-04-05, 16:42
    Hello I am trying to use the --ratelimit_ips option I want to use --ratelimit_ips=200/3600, can you please help me with this, no matter what I add to the configuration file or command line, it keeps saying DDOS abuse protection set for 15 clients for up to 300 seconds
    Permalink
  20. BDong said on 2020-04-09, 21:38
    The following error when trying to ssh to nnnsoma.pagekite.me:

    "kex_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host"

    My configuration file:

    ###[ Current settings for pagekite.py v1.0.0.190225. ]#########
    #
    ## NOTE: This file may be rewritten/reordered by pagekite.py.
    #

    ##[ Default kite and account details ]##
    kitename = nnnsoma.pagekite.me
    kitesecret = a3ezbxkf2k273a9bb663687kfa78kxez

    ##[ Front-end settings: use pagekite.net defaults ]##
    defaults

    ##[ Back-ends and local services ]##
    service_on = http:@kitename : localhost:80 : @kitesecret
    service_on = raw-22:@kitename : localhost:22 : @kitesecret





    ##[ Miscellaneous settings ]##
    savefile = /root/.pagekite.rc

    ###[ End of pagekite.py configuration ]#########
    END
    Permalink
  21. remi BARRELLON said on 2020-06-18, 20:10
    Hi,
    I got the same issue from today. I was using pagekite since 6 years, last version being 0.59, all was working fine. During shutdown covid period, i stopped to use it, now i started again today, but impossible to get kites running again. Batch was stuck after the front end adress...
    I'm still under Windows XP, using python2.7, with "BitVise SSH Server" in association to an app "connectbot" on a smartphone to create a HTTP tunnel with port redirection.
    I then changed to latest version 1.5.2, this ran well but...i got same error message than you guys:
    "!!! Failed to connect to 172.105.59.232:443
    Unable to verify SSL certificates!
    ....
    "

    If you understood the root cause of such failure, and if you know how to workaround it, please let me know.....

    Thanks a lot in advance.
    Permalink
  22. remi BARRELLON said on 2020-06-22, 11:03
    Hi all, as "lesson learnt" for people who will search on internet for same failure, here is the fix solution to apply (you can say thanks ;p).
    Well, for those SSL certificate issues, the solution is to uninstall the old Python2.7.3 version and to install the last one compatible with Windows XP version, meaning the 3.4.4. You delete your old config.cfg file (search in your directories) and then launch again your pagekite.py batch (you will have to confirm some questions from pagekite), then, kites will fly again !
    Last point, to be sure that you use the latest version of python, type under a "cmd" (DOS console) the sentence "python --version", it shall display Python 3.4.4, ensuring you have the latest OK version to launch your pakegite.py code.
    Thanks !
    Permalink
  23. FERNANDO GALVAN ECUADOR said on 2024-03-13, 16:35
    el Pagekite talvez funciona con otro puerto que no se el 443 o puerto 80
    Permalink

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