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Published 20 hours ago • verified publisher icon 10up

Connection Issues

Open Drmzindec opened this issue 1 year ago • 9 comments

Describe your question

Over the past week 2 of my sites have limited connection, i tried to add the connections again after clearing out everything and keep receiving the following error message:

Distributor not installed on remote site.
The external site is private or not a WordPress site. (rest_api_uri_not_found)

In my nginx logs when setting up a manual connection I get a 401 response on the /wp-json endpoint using Application Passwords.

Some info:

  • Sites are on different servers but run the exact same stack.
  • Both sites have the plugin installed and on the latest version.
  • Both sites have the same plugins and theme installed.
  • Both sites are connecting to other sites fine and have full permissions.
  • Connecting to the sites staging environment which has the same plugins, theme and stack is working fine, this is only happening when trying to connect to the live site.

This started happening about 3 weeks ago and I havent been able to solve it. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Code of Conduct

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Drmzindec avatar Sep 28 '23 10:09 Drmzindec

@Drmzindec is there a security plugin on either site or perhaps is one of the hosts injecting their own firewall that might be blocking Distributor's access?

jeffpaul avatar Sep 28 '23 15:09 jeffpaul

@jeffpaul There is a security plugin Wordfence and we use WAF, but the weird thing is that Distributor connects fine to other sites that have the same setup, its just this one.

The only difference is that its located in different timezone, but that was never an issue in the past.

Drmzindec avatar Sep 29 '23 06:09 Drmzindec

@Drmzindec and you're certain that the WF and WAF configs match on the site that's not connecting properly to the ones that connect properly?

jeffpaul avatar Oct 05 '23 21:10 jeffpaul

@jeffpaul The WAF is shared between the sites so the settings are exactly the same, the WF I switched off on both sites and the connection is still saying the site is private. I added the connection details manually and than got the limited connection (yellow) icon.

Drmzindec avatar Oct 18 '23 06:10 Drmzindec

@Drmzindec if you're manually adding in a username/password, then that might be part of the problem. The ideal solution is using the External Connection setup wizard that uses Application Passwords.

jeffpaul avatar Oct 23 '23 19:10 jeffpaul

This issue has been automatically closed because there has been no response to our request for more information. With only the information that is currently in the issue, we don't have enough information to take action. Please reach out if you have or find the answers we need so that we can investigate further. See this blog post on bug reports and the importance of repro steps for more information about the kind of information that may be helpful.

github-actions[bot] avatar Nov 06 '23 19:11 github-actions[bot]

@jeffpaul That was not the issue. I have found the issue.

Here is how to reproduce the issue:

  1. Go to Yoast SEO
  2. Go to Settings
  3. Go to Crawl optimisation
  4. Find: Remove unused resources
  5. Disable Remove WP-JSON API

The SEO manager switched this on and I had no idea about it so where debugging in all the wrong places.

Drmzindec avatar Nov 08 '23 12:11 Drmzindec

It sounds like this issue has a clear root cause due to the Yoast setting disabling the site's JSON endpoints. Sounds to me like there's no actionable item here.

psorensen avatar Jul 17 '24 23:07 psorensen

@psorensen perhaps best we can do is add an item to https://github.com/10up/distributor?tab=readme-ov-file#known-caveatsissues?

jeffpaul avatar Aug 20 '24 17:08 jeffpaul