Verify Network Connectivity for Botium Agents

This article offers valuable insights and suggestions for users to troubleshoot and resolve connectivity issues with Botium agents. It covers various potential causes of connectivity problems and provides practical solutions to ensure reliable network connections for your chatbot testing environments.

Possible Reasons

Company firewall rules are prohibiting access to the chatbot endpoint
Hostname resolution is not configured correctly or not accessible to docker containers
Network access is only possible by using a company HTTP(S) proxy
For HTTP(S) chatbot endpoints or HTTP(S) proxies, SSL certificate handling may be a problem (self-signed certificates, non-standard SSL signer, …)
Hostname mapping within a docker network not configured/used correctly
…

Hints for Connectivity Troubles

Whenever you are receiving error messages in the Botium logs like these, we suggest to verify the network connectivity:

ESOCKETTIMEOUT
ENOTCONNECTED
hostname not found
invalid SSL certificate
git error 128

Troubleshooting

To verify connectivity from your Botium Server(s) or Agent(s), follow these steps.

Identify Docker Container:
Find the docker container id of the Botium Server or a Botium Agent. Run this docker command to see the running containers and find the container id in the first column of the container in question:
```
docker ps
```
Select the docker container from the second column, the image name, which points to Botium Box Server or Botium Agent.
Connect to Docker Container with Terminal:
Run this command to spawn a bash shell within the docker container in question - replace <container-id> with the container id from the previous step.
```
docker exec -it <container-id> /bin/bash
```

Check Connectivity with Linux Tools

There are several options now to check the connectivity

Check IP Connectivity with ping: First you should try to ping the IP-Address or Hostname.
```
ping <ip-address-to-check>
```
Check Hostname Resolution with nslookup: If you connect by Hostname instead of IP address, you can check hostname resolution.
```
nslookup <hostname-to-check>
```
Check IP/Port Connectivity with nc: netcat is a universal tool to (among others) check network connectivity. To check if the connection to a given port on a given host is available, run this command (obviously, replace IP-Adress and port):
```
nc -zv <ip-address-to-check> <port>
```
It will immediately show if connection is possible.
Check HTTP(S) Connectivity with wget: To check if HTTP(S) connectivity is given, use wget. To do a simple HTTP(S) GET request, try this:
```
wget <my-endpoint-url>
```
Tip: wget is an extremely versatile tool, please consult the manual or Google for more usage scenarios.
Alternative: Check HTTP(S) Connectivity with curl: Run this command to install curl:
```
apk add curl
```
Note: For this step, you need access to the Alpine Linux software repository, so please make sure to open up the required network ports. If you cannot do this, you will have to add curl to the Botium Dockerfiles and build your own images (for advanced users only).
To do a simple HTTP(S) GET request, try this:
```
curl http://my-selenium-server:4444/wd/hub
```