simon.schönbeck.dk

Tag: firefox

  • “Unable to load stream. Please make sure port 7446 is open on your NVR.”

    In case you are seeing the error message “Unable to load stream. Please make sure port 7446 is open on your NVR.” when trying to watch the live camera stream on your Unifi Video NVR system from Ubiquiti, then the solution is rather simple.

    The error is caused by the self-issued certificate that comes by default with the Unifi NVR. As Mozilla Firefox has strict SSL (HTTPS) rules making sure that one does not connect to the wrong or fake website as could happen in e.g. a phishing attempt. I have not tried myself but from what I have read apparently Google Chrome does not enforce this in the same manner making the stream work out of the box in Chrome.

    The solution is to open the URL to the video stream directly in a separate tab or window so that you can accept the self-signed certificate for the session:

    https://NVR_IP_address:7446

    The page itself will return an error after the certificate is accepted but that is fine, it is simply to accept the certificate. After that simply reload the NVR interface and the HTTPS video stream will work fine

    Please note that if you are accessing the NVR from an external network you may have a firewall instance blocking the actual port. This instead would require port forwarding to be set up and that is a different story.

  • Running several Firefox versions simultaneously

    Ever been in the need of running more than one instance of Mozilla Firefox? Well, I have. Multiple times.

    I use Firefox for my browsing and development. Combining both in the same profile has been a pain many times especially when ones development is intensive leading to high memory and CPU consumption unfortunately ending with a browser crash.

    Some time ago I starting using Firefox Beta since it included the Sync feature built-in. At some point I wanted to revert back to the release version again as the add-ons needed to be ready for Beta as well and it could take the add-on authors some time to update leaving them disabled till then.

    The easiest thing is to run two or more versions simultaneously of Firefox which provides you with increased flexibility, especially if you do web development of any type.

    To proceed simply download another version of Firefox and install selecting the custom choice. Make sure you install it in a different path than your current Firefox installation.

    The key to get more than one instance of Firefox running is to use multiple profiles. To create an additional profile for your next version open the command prompt (if on Windows) and type the following:

    "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox" -profilemanager -no-remote

    Obviously change the path to match your own system if needed.

     

     

    Now the profile manager should be open and you can simply create a new profile and call it something else like e.g. “BETA”. Then click “Exit” afterwards to quit the profile manager.

     

     

    Next you need to edit the launcher of your newest installation of Firefox, by right-clicking its icon in the Start menu and selecting Properties. At the first text box add the following to the path:

    -P yournewprofilename -no-remote

    So it looks something like this:

    "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox Beta\firefox.exe" -P BETA -no-remote

     

    Save and launch your second instance of Firefox by clicking on the same icon. You should now see two different “Firefox.exe” processes in your task manager.

     

     

    In that same screen you were before you can also change the title and icon itself so that it is easier to distinguish which version is which.

     

  • Pidgin certificate prompt

    Today using the version of Pidgin that came with Fedora 10 I received the following certificate prompt:

    Accept certificate for ows.messenger.msn.com?
    The root certificate this one claims to be issued by is unknown to Pidgin.

    The majority of cases of unknown certificate issuers are due to the chain of trust breaking down. This break down in the certificate chain is mainly caused by the software in question not including the intermediate certificate authorities certificates. Without these intermediate certificates the software can not verify through the certificate hierarchy up till the root certificate and therefore prompts the user about what to do.

    The options I received in the Pidgin prompt were:

    View certificate
    Accept
    Reject

    Upon selecting “View certificate” I am presented with the following details:

    Common name: ows.messenger.msn.com
    Fingerprint (SHA1): a9:9c:2d:ee:4a:d1:c8:7d:a7:c5:c3:05:32:98:5f:ee:57:87:73:8a
    Activation date: Tue Jan 29 14:37:21 2008
    Expiration date: Wed Jan 28 14:37:21 2009

    So far everything looks as it is a bona fide certificate but to verify the identity completely I load the page https://ows.messenger.msn.com/ in Firefox. As expected no certificate warnings were received and I opened the certificate viewer to see its details and confirmed the data matches up with the data received in Pidgin:

    certificate
    Certificate Viewer

    I can safely trust this certificate as Firefox has verified through the certificate chain that all intermediate certificates are valid too:

    certificate_chain
    Certificate Chain

    This certificate is simply used by Microsoft for the Live Messenger offline messaging service. Although you normally would trust verified certificates it did happen in the past that certificates were incorrectly issued to the wrong people. So always be cautious!