“Unable to communicate with Wordfence plugin” from wf central – dev sites

  • Resolved zignorp

    (@zignorp)


    1 year, 2 months ago

    I’ve got staging sites pw protected, wordfence is installed, but there’s an extra layer of protection there, so I think that’s a problem when I add the site url from wf central. If I go to the wf dashboard>tools>diagnostics, I see that the 401 error is preventing it connecting back. Any way to enter this info in the dashboard? Other sites are connecting well. The vid in the documentation on connecting was super helpful.

    • This topic was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by zignorp.
    • This topic was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by zignorp.
Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Support wfpeter

    (@wfpeter)

    1 year, 2 months ago

    Hi @zignorp, I’m glad to hear the videos are proving helpful.

    Am I correct in saying you’re talking about Basic Authentication / “.htpasswd” protection on your staging sites?

    If so, this does add extra considerations when connecting Wordfence Central because the site needs to be able to connect to yours.

    Some hosts like WP Engine have a feature in their control panel to enable basic auth. However, as they’re moving away from using .htaccess files, they may need to assist customers in ways to allow the site to connect back to itself, and/or to allow connections from our servers. I’m not sure if you’re on that platform but thought it was worth mentioning.

    Basic auth for everyone, except allowing certain IPs is shown here, which could be a possible solution: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4102763/apache-basic-authentication-except-for-those-allowed

    For your convenience, our IPs can be found here: https://www.wordfence.com/help/advanced/#servers-and-ip-range

    Thanks,
    Peter.

    Thread Starter zignorp

    (@zignorp)

    1 year, 2 months ago

    Thanks, Peter. I’d like to hear how anyone else is handling this, if they have sites that they’re testing new options with a small subset of people viewing.

    Plugin Support wfpeter

    (@wfpeter)

    1 year, 1 month ago

    Hi @zignorp,

    I have only been aware of a few customers using this method, which is where most of my information on this topic has come from. Allowing our IPs as exceptions could be the best plan unless disabling basic auth altogether and blocking all access (except for certain fixed IPs including Wordfence and your admins) was a viable option – which it may not be if the IPs of you or other users with access are likely to change.

    Thanks again,
    Peter.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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