FAQ Yunohost Common Issues

This page of a collection of common issues that people run into in this class when getting started with Yunohost.

Using The Yunohost Diagnosis

The yunohost official installation guide, provides the guidance below on using the Yunohost diagnosis, but in this class we follow a couple steps that are different than the standard installation and so we need to use the initial diagnosis a little differently.

If you are running yuonohost in the cloud, then you can use the diagnosis in just the way they suggest (and if things are working properly, it should be pretty straightforward to get "green" for all the critical diagnosis items).

If you are running yunohost locally, and you decide to set-up port forwarding for public internet access, then you can also use the diagnosis in the standard way (as port-forwarding is the standard way yunohost expects you to configure a local server to be visible on the public internet).

However, as described in the tunnels tutorial, in this class we are also exploring a way to make local servers visible on the public internet using tunnels (a non-standard-to-yunohost approach). With the tunnels approach, we can completely ignore the section of warnings in the diagnosis about tunnels as well as about ports, both of which are not relevant. Similarly, when we are modifying /etc/hosts to setup apps to be run purely on the local network (tutorial here), this is also a non-standard-yunohost-usage and we can also ignore the diagnosis section about DNS records and ports. Similarly, in the case of using /etc/hosts or tunnels, we don't need to worry about https configuration (this is handled on the tunnel gateway for now).

Lastly, mostly in this class we are ignoring the functionality of Yunohost as an e-mail server. So we can ignore the warnings about e-mail configurations. If you want to explore yunohost as an e-mail server, more info is here, although be warned, as I've written about in this blog post, its difficult to self-host an e-mail server and not end up in people's spam folders, unless you setup an SMTP relay through another e-mail provider which is somewhat of an advanced usecase (a guide is here).

Installing Yunohost In The Cloud Vs On A Local Server

a few folks ran into into issues this year about confusion between local and cloud setups. there are many similarities, but also some differences. the key thing is that a local server is not initially visible on the public internet, so some extra steps are needed to do that, and there are some ways of accessing a local server (through the local network) that are not possible with a remote server. with a remote/cloud server, of course you are not actually on the same wifi/local-network, so none of the instructions related to that apply.

I have now made two tutorials for installing etherpad, one for a local server, and one for the cloud, so hopefully that clears up some of the confusion.

Tunnel Gateway Sends Me To Yunohost Login?

after following the tunnels tutorial, some folks ran into the issue that their subdomain appears on gateway.commoninternet.net but when they visit their domain (e.g. cookielink.commoninternet.net), it takes them to a yunohost login page which does not accept their username or password. This is most likely because for the tunnel to work, an application needs to be installed and running on your homeserver with the domain you registered on the tunnel gateway. If no application is installed on your homeserver with that domain, then the tunnel gateway will redirect the visitor to its own yunohost login (which has a different username and password) — this is kind of a weird quirk but for now the solution is just make sure you have an application installed at the tunneled domain (like etherpad or lichen-markdown or something else), which is what you will want eventually anyway.

How Long Does It Take To Install Etherpad?

most of the time it will be pretty quick, a few minutes, and then show a success message when its done. but sometimes the connection hangs while its installing, so it will just appear to be installing forever even though it actually worked. If there's no sign of life for more than five or ten minutes, than you can just refresh the page, and go to the "Applications" section of Yunohost and you should see there that Etherpad is installed (if it worked).