Printoid for OctoPrint

Since Printoid v6, I’ve introduced a very useful feature for who encounters some issues with the connection to OctoPrint: the ability to directly send me the connection logs.

 

Why it is useful for me

In fact, you can send me a message if ever you can’t connect Printoid to your OctoPrint server, there is no problem for me to help you making Printoid working well.

But I can’t do anything if you just say:

• I can’t connect
• Printoid does not work
• Printoid wont connect

Okay, Printoid wont connect actually in your case 😉 But why? You can’t of course answer to this question, and that’s because you are sending me this e-mail. But I will shock you: I can’t too!

In fact, I really need to understand the situation: what are you trying to do, what are the conditions of your network, what is your configuration, etc.

The connection logs are a pretty good support for your message, because I will be able to correlate these informations with what’s exactly happening when Printoid is connecting: and then I will be able to understand what’s going wrong, and answer to your questions: why and how to solve this?

 

Why the logs are not sufficient

As I’ve said above, there are two informations I really need in order to help you to find a solution:

• What you have (your current configuration)
• What you get (the logs)

All the users are in different situations. And I don’t know what’s yours! I can find something in the logs, but the causes can been multiple.

 

What details do the developer is expecting with the logs

When you are sending the logs to the developer, you have an empty part in the mail to complete your message. You can add, for example:

• Is it the first time you are using Printoid?
• Has the connection worked well before today?
• Have you entered both LAN and WAN IP in your OctoPrint profile?
• Is the connection failing on LAN or on WAN only?
• Is your server expecting calls over SSL (HTTPS)?
• Have you activated the connection using the basic authentication?
• Is your OctoPrint web-interface reachable from Google Chrome for example?
• Have you double-checked what you’ve entered in your configuration?

 

What does the logs contain

The logs you are sending to the developper does not contain any private informations, but only you LAN and WAN IP addresses. This is useful for me to know how your address look like, and I can also check if your server is really reachable over the Internet for example.

You can of course edit the traces to hide the IP addresses / hostnames if you want, but I will assume that you are sure of yourself about them.

 

What should you never do

Do not send me any traces if you server is not reachable at all from Google Chrome or any other web browser. The traces are useless in that case, and I won’t be able to help you at all.

Do not send me the same traces twice or more. One time is sufficient.

I will, of course, try to help you in any case. But please help me to save my precious time and be smart with your messages content 🙂