making an actionpad available via internet

[Robbert Mak]

Hi all.

I’d love to hear the best practice regarding making a certain actionpad availabe via internet to the customer, with a seperate password (so other then the admin password of the core S).

Would you do this via portforwarding on the router? And how do you avoid the page where you either choose ‘actionpad’ or ‘configuration’?

or is there another (better) way to do this?

Thanks again,

Robbert

[Christoph Paduch]

Hello Robbert

The ActionPad itself is not Password protected, so if you know the address, you can access it.
The WebUI configuration is protected by a password.

When you address the Core S, you will have the following options:
http://<ip-address>/ –> This will display the welcome screen, where you can choose between ActionPad and configuration.
http://<ip-address>/ActionPad2/ActionPad2.html –> This will lead you to the ActionPad directly.
http://<ip-address>/webui/ –> opens the WebUI
http://<ip-address>/logs/ –> gives access to the log files

When using a PC, LCE2, LCE2mx the Actionpad needs <ip-address>:<port> instead of the <ip-address>.

You will find more information in the manual.

Regarding access from the internet, you should not give direct access from/to the internet especially with a Core S, in order to keep network traffic low.

I would probably set up a website that will display the Actionpad in a way, that the user cannot work around this site. The site would only allow limited access.

I hope, this helps.

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Kind regards / Freundliche Grüße
Christoph Paduch

[Robbert Mak]

In earlier days it was possible to password protect an actionpad, is this somewehe on the development schedule?

[Robbert Mak]

Has the introduction of Sympholight 5 brought any new possibilities regarding protecting an actionpad thru pin / password?

[Christoph Paduch]

Due to the structure of the ActionPad, that all viewers see the same page and have the same access level, it would need too many changes to set up users and pins and of course this is not the focus of the ActionPad.
But there are ways to workaround:
– using the Rest API with autorization
– using SymphoCity with user and role management, this solution also has access to the Rest API
– using self created web pages with a form. Since V5.0 there is a small webserver integrated.

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Kind regards / Freundliche Grüße
Christoph Paduch

[Robbert Mak]

Ok, how do we start using Symphocity to manage our installations?

[Christoph Paduch]

Hello Robbert

please contact our support team by email: support(at)ecue.com

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Kind regards / Freundliche Grüße
Christoph Paduch

[Tim Riemann]

Hi Robbert,
currently a special password protection for the AP is not planned for the near future, however, we introduced the REST API to give you access to the control functionalities of SL. SymphoCity will, in the future, also support user management and user level access.

To solve your problem, you could use a reverse proxy (see Wikipedia – Reverse Proxy), which is basically a web server that sits in front of the SL. It get’s the requests from the internet and forwards them to the correct server (you could e.g. configure it to have multiple servers and different ports on different URLs behind the reverse proxy server).
Since our web server does not support HTTPS, you can also let the reverse proxy server do the encryption of the ActionPad data (e.g. by a certificate of the Let’s Encrypt initiative) and by putting a .htaccess into it, you can protect it with your own password.
The best way on how to set up such a system depends on your network installation. I would recommend a Linux machine running Nginx as a network server (and there are tons of tutorials on how to set up such a system). If you are using a Windows system, you might want to give Nginx for Windows a go, however, the authors write on their website that they do not recommend the usage under Windows. Another way to go might be using the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to run Nginx as a reverse proxy.

I hope that this might help you to solve your problem.

Regards,
Tim

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