[Doc] Follow-up on documenting offline cloud license troubleshooting
Problem
I’m seeing an increase in support tickets where customers run into connection problems when they try to activate their subscription. That’s no surprise, as the number of cloud licenses increases.
The only information we have is from the docs: Enable an encrypted HTTPS connection from your GitLab instance to customers.gitlab.com (with IP addresses 104.18.26.123 and 104.18.27.123) on port 443
A lot of customer lack knowledge about their firewall/proxy, so we need a way to prove that things are not configured properly on their side, and that they should work with their network admin to get it fixed.
What can we use as tool to proof an incorrect network configuration?
I thought of curl -v telnet://customers.gitlab.com:443, but I’ve already had a ticket where this fails, but curl -v https://customers.gitlab.com seems to work…
Source: https://gitlab.slack.com/archives/CMJ8JR0RH/p1664875762789579.
Original issue for documentation: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/355790
Proposal
@rverschoor (quoting from the conversation):
To keep a SSOT, I think Activate GitLab Enterprise Edition (EE) should have an extra short explanation, and then point to Setting custom environment variables for the implementation details.
Add to the documentation:
- Add
curl -v telnet://customers.gitlab.com:443
as a means of troubleshooting the connection - If the above fails:
- Set up a proxy in gitlab.rb pointing to their own server for access to the internet:
gitlab_rails['env'] = { "https_proxy" => "http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@the-company.com:8080" }
- Contact their network admin so to make the changes to the proxy
- Set up a proxy in gitlab.rb pointing to their own server for access to the internet: