Unable to acces IPC remotely

[Headfull Eyeballs]

Hey so I am setting up my Orange Pi Zero running on Armbian Bionic with Linux 5.3.9-sunxi to function as a ArchiSteamFarm Machine which will be mainly used for this application only.
I have already installed ASF completly with all its prerequisites and it functions how it is supposed to do, only I havent managed to figure out how I am able to acces my IPC interface over my network on another computer.

So what have I done so far?

• I got the whole ASF application working like its supposed to be (except for this).
  
• I have followed the guide on the IPC section on the wiki and used the example configuration for allowing remote acces.
  
• I have port forwarded port 1242 with the IP adres of my orange Pi in my router.

What happens when trying to acces my IPC interface remotely?
Whenever I enter into my browser http://192.168.0.3:1242(192.168.0.3 is the IP of my Orange Pi) I am getting the error that the site isnt available and has refused the connection and that I should check my internet connection and my proxy and firewall.

what do my configuration files look like?
My configuration files are the following.
for the ASF.json file it is configured as the following:

{
	"AutoRestart": true,
	"Blacklist": [],
	"CommandPrefix": "!",
	"ConfirmationsLimiterDelay": 10,
	"ConnectionTimeout": 60,
	"CurrentCulture": null,
	"Debug": false,
	"FarmingDelay": 15,
	"GiftsLimiterDelay": 1,
	"Headless": false,
	"IdleFarmingPeriod": 8,
	"InventoryLimiterDelay": 3,
	"IPC": true,
	"IPCPassword": null,
	"IPCPrefixes": [
		"http://*:1242"
	],
	"LoginLimiterDelay": 10,
	"MaxFarmingTime": 10,
	"MaxTradeHoldDuration": 15,
	"OptimizationMode": 0,
	"Statistics": true,
	"SteamOwnerID": 76561198088533464,
	"SteamProtocols": 7,
	"UpdateChannel": 1,
	"UpdatePeriod": 24,
	"WebLimiterDelay": 200,
	"WebProxy": null,
	"WebProxyPassword": null,
	"WebProxyUsername": null
}

The IPC.conf file looks like this:

{
	"Kestrel": {
		"Endpoints": {
			"HTTP": {
				"Url": "http://*:1242"
			}
		}
	}
}

NOTE:
I have also ASF configured on a seperate PC running Ubuntu 18.04 and I have that also configured to being able to acces the IPC interface remotely over the network which works just fine until this day without any issues. I have no port forwarded for that PC and the ASF.json and IPC.conf files are configured the same.

Also I am using the ASF-linux-arm version of ASF

IF anyone got some suggestions or sees something I am missing please let me know about it, that would help out alot.

[Archi]

There is not much we can offer besides verifying that ASF correctly listens on the interface. You've followed all the instructions correctly and there is no misconfiguration of any sort, while any eventual connection issues are out of ASF scope since we don't know how your network, firewall, machine or configuration looks like.

What you can do, is verifying the thing mentioned above. After starting ASF, you can check what netstat says:

netstat -tulpn | grep :1242

If you can see that ASF properly listens on all the interfaces:

tcp6       0      0 :::1242                 :::*                    LISTEN

Then there is nothing else you can do on ASF side, since it's working correctly. Everything else includes your firewall, router, network and configuration of those.

What you can do is trying to access your machine through IPv6 rather than IPv4, in case your machine has IPv6 address assigned. If that won't work either, or you have no IPv6, then you'll need to check yourself why you can't access your machine through IPv4.

Have you verified if other services are accessible from the outside? For example ssh? If yes, it might be some kind of only specific ports being blocked, in which case you could perhaps workaround the problem by making ASF listen on :80. You'll likely need root for that though. If no other services are accessible then you're blocked entirely, likely by the router directly in front of your machine.

[Headfull Eyeballs]

Hey Archi,
Thank you for your reply and letting me know my configuration is good.
I just tried

netstat -tulpn | grep :1242

At first this wasnt giving me any output, so I tried and change in the ASF.json and the IPC.conf file to change the port to 80 and see if this maybe works, unfortunately this didnt.
So I decided and reboot the machine and run this command again:

netstat -tulpn | grep :1242

This time it gave the following output:

thom@orangepizero:~$ sudo netstat -tulpn | grep :1242
tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:1242          0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      1680/./ArchiSteamFa 
tcp6       0      0 ::1:1242                :::*                    LISTEN      1680/./ArchiSteamFa

Altho sadly I am still unable to load the IPC interface when going to the URL in my browser, so i will have a further look at this tommorow.

But atleast thank you for the fast response, I am hoping to resolve this problem soon :D

EDIT #1:
I almost forgot to include, but yes I am able to access my machine from external resources as the Orange Pi Zero is an Raspberry Pi zero equivalent I use this machine with SSH only, so I can confirm port 80 for SSH works without any issues.

What might be something that is the issue but I am not sure about.
I got 1 Raspberry Pi Zero running Pi-Hole and OpenVPN, for OpenVPN I was required to setup an firewall and only open up the required ports to make it more secure, I don't remember 1242 being a port which I opened on there.
Now as that same Raspberry Pi is also being used as a Pi-Hole and so is my DNS server for my whole network is that maybe a possibility that it is getting blocked on that end and that I need to open up the port on that machine aswell.
It's a really long shot but it's worth a try I think.

[Archi]

Well yeah, if you remember opening any ports and not including 1242 in it, you should open 1242 as well there. Like I said, I don't know your configuration, but ASF uses port that you specify in its IPC.config, by default 1242.

[Rudokhvist]

Just to make sure: how exactly your IPC config file is named? In the start post you refer to it as to IPC.conf, but correct name should be IPC.config.

[Archi]

And like Ryzhe pointed out above, the netstat above doesn't specify binding to all interfaces, only to localhost, which means that you didn't save IPC.config at the correct name. This might be the issue you're having, as by default ASF allows for localhost connections only.

[Headfull Eyeballs]

Originally posted by Ryzhehvost:

Just to make sure: how exactly your IPC config file is named? In the start post you refer to it as to IPC.conf, but correct name should be IPC.config.

I have it named as IPC.conf, I think that might be my issue actually. I am gonna change it right away and test it out.

[Headfull Eyeballs]

YES

Ok so now it is working how it is supposed to be working.
Turns out as my IPC filename was named as IPC.conf was causing the issue, after renaming it to IPC.config it is working without any issues.

Thank you @Archi and @Ryzhehvost for helping me troubleshoot this stupid mistake I made :D
Oh and opening the port on my raspberry pi wasnt needed ;)