Unable to login via Alexa Skill

Monocle

@ALL.

Sorry, about the delay in getting this issue resolved. I was away from my office all last week and unable to access the necessary details and resources to work on this problem.

PLEASE TRY AGAIN NOW. (You may need to restart your Monocle Gateway instances.)

The issue started when I replaced all the SSL certificates at the end of January. Even though we have a pre-paid and valid 5 year certificate, the SSL rules require that it gets replaced annually now. So after updating all the certificates and restarting all the services that allow Monocle to function, it all appeared to be working from my local testing. However somewhere in the changes … the Monocle/Alexa authentication service failed to re-connect to the Monocle backend database properly. Perhaps it was holding onto (cached) the previous SSL for its secure connection which then expired. I’ll have to dig a bit deeper to better understand why it continued to fail to connect over the course of several days, but I believe this was the underlying issue causing failed account re-linking, failure to refresh Alexa tokens and failure for Monocle Gateway to reconnect and throw 401 errors.

Please let me know if any of you have further issues getting Monocle working again.

Thanks, Robert

Monocle

@VolkerM said in Unable to login via Alexa Skill:

Same issue.

I also tried to change my password but it do not work.

What I noticed is that in the portal the url is:
portal.monocle.com

And the alexa skill uses the url:
auth.monocle.com

for login.

I think this could be the reason.

Yes … those are separate micro-services running on the backend. The portal was fine but the auth server was failing to connect to the shared Monocle database (after SSL cert replacements) … thus failing authentications for Alexa skill linking and token renewals. More details on my other post in this thread.

vmsman

@Monocle Robert. Thanks for getting things squared away. I can report that it works GREAT again. You have restored my Wife Approval Factor (WAF). I know what you are talking about in regards to the certificate issue. I have a great deal of certs and API tokens supporting services related to my YouTube channel related services and I have seen them go south due to the same type issues. I appreciate you and all the hard work that you do! Thanks again.

Monocle

@vmsman said in Unable to login via Alexa Skill:

@Monocle Robert. Thanks for getting things squared away. I can report that it works GREAT again. You have restored my Wife Approval Factor (WAF). I know what you are talking about in regards to the certificate issue. I have a great deal of certs and API tokens supporting services related to my YouTube channel related services and I have seen them go south due to the same type issues. I appreciate you and all the hard work that you do! Thanks again.

Thanks for the confirmation and glad to hear its working for you. The SSL cert replacement process itself went fine but for some reason one of the backend services failed to re-connect to the database. But all the other services (portal, proxy, etc.) re-connected just fine. Still scratching my head on this one. I’ll have to dig into some code to try and figure this one out :-)

Thanks, Robert

vmsman

@Monocle Excellent. If you want to loop me in on providing support in some way, I can provide some “backup” help if desired.

DaBbleR

@Monocle Thanks so much for your support.
I completly undestand you were away and could not take a look at it.

I’m wondering if you would like to have collaborators to help you maintain the whole project.

I’m eager to help you in case you are interesting in, just let me know.
Again thank you

andi

@Monocle
Thank you for your fast support. Unfortunately I still get the same issue when trying to activate the Skill in the Alex app. I get redirected to the authentication screen but when I enter my Email and password I get the message that they are incorrect.
When I use the same credentials in the browser to access portal.monoclecam.com the login works and I can see my cameras.
My Alexa account is on the German marketplace, if this somehow related to the issue.

Monocle

@andi

No, all languages and handled by the same set of backend services.

I did encounter some failures when trying to link the skill using my Chrome browser but it worked fine via desktop Safari and on my phone. What device/browser are you using to try to activate the skill? Perhaps try a different one to see. In these failures I observed I could not see anything wrong with the Monocle implementation and nothing has changed there for years. Perhaps some new issue in the Chrome browser?

Thanks, Robert

andi

@Monocle Hi Robert,

Thank you for your fast and in-depth support. I could solve the issue by switching to the Desktop version of the website. It seems the Alexa App uses Google Chrome on my Android device.

Using the Desktop Version the login worked fine.

With best regards

Andreas

Monocle

@andi said in Unable to login via Alexa Skill:

@Monocle Hi Robert,

Thank you for your fast and in-depth support. I could solve the issue by switching to the Desktop version of the website. It seems the Alexa App uses Google Chrome on my Android device.

Using the Desktop Version the login worked fine.

With best regards

Andreas

Glad to hear its working now.