Problems with connections from South Africa

Community Support
1

Description

We have a Rocket.Chat instance running on a root server located in Germany. As long as users were also in Germany or nearby European countries, there were no problems.

However, in July, some of our clients’ employees were in South Africa and attempted to log in. It seems they were unable to do so due to technical issues - presumably related to connectivity. They tried both hotel Wi-Fi and their mobile connections, which they described as “fast and stable.”

So, there are two questions:

* Has anyone also experienced issues with long-distance connections, particularly between Central Europe and Southern Africa?

* Is there anything I can do to prevent such problems? Either through Rocket.Chat configuration or directly on the server?

(Using a server outside Europe is not possible due to privacy / law restrictions.)

Server Setup Information

  • Version of Rocket.Chat Server: 7.6.0
  • Operating System: Ubuntu 22.04
  • Deployment Method: Docker
  • Number of Running Instances: 1
  • DB Replicaset Oplog: Activated
  • NodeJS Version: 22.13.1
  • MongoDB Version: 6.0.13
  • Proxy: Nginx
  • Firewalls involved: No
2

The hosting server has no firewall? Seriously? :zany_face:

Do you have a reverse proxy and https set up and running correctly?

Have you tested websockets?

What do you logs say?

Likelihood is they are being blocked somewhere/somehow either at the VM end, or their end no matter how ‘fast and stable’ their connection is.

Could be geoip blocked or other firewalling at the server end.

Could be DDP rate limited by Rocket.

Could be browser related.

Could be ISP related.

You need to check on their machine at the time they had issues.

(I have a small VM with Rocket in France and people use it from South Africa, Australia and New Zealand without issues - yes a bit more laggy for them than me but works OK)