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Frequently Asked Questions

If you are a first time user, please make sure to also read the How to setup an account page.

How to report SIPE problems

Where do I report bugs?

Link to the Bug Tracker. If you don't feel comfortable to post the debug log in public then please tick the Mark as Private checkmark when you create the bug.

Please do not report missing features as bugs. Failure to do so will cause the bug to be ignored and closed immediately!

Link to the Feature Request Tracker.

What information do I need to include?

You must provide an extended debug log from Pidgin/Adium. Failure to do so will cause the bug to be ignored and closed immediately!

Please note that Pidgin by default is NOT running in debug mode and therefore the contents of the debug window are useless. How to enable the debug mode:

Client
Pidgin Start Pidgin with the --debug option from the command line
Full debug output also requires the environment variable PURPLE_UNSAFE_DEBUG=1
Adium Enable Adium Debug Logging
Miranda ???

Please make sure that you have disabled all other accounts in Pidgin when taking the log file.

WARNING: the log may reveal your password!

For certain setups the log may contain your password in cleartext or obfuscated as Base64 string. Please make sure to overwrite those places with dummy text before uploading the log:

Debug log line to overwrite Example
<wsse:Password>...</wsse:Password> <wsse:Password>MySuperSecretPassword</wsse:Password>
Authorization: Basic ... Authorization: Basic amR1c2VyQGRvZXMubm90LmV4aXN0LmNvbTpNeVN1cGVyU2VjcmV0UGFzc3dvcmQK

Please attach the log to the bug report or put it up on a pastebin-like page and provide an URL to that page. If you don't feel comfortable to post the log in public then please tick the Mark as Private checkmark when you create the bug.

If you are posting to the help forum then please do not copy & paste the log into the text, but instead attach the file to the post or put it up on a pastebin-like page and provide an URL to that page. If you don't feel comfortable to post the log in public then email it to the developers directly.

SIPE crashes. What information do I need to include?

Please make sure that the debug information for pidgin, pidgin-sipe (if you didn't compile it yourself) and glib2 are installed on your system.

You'll need the debug log (see above) and the backtrace from a debugger. F.ex. run Pidgin under gdb control, reproduce the crash and then enter bt at the gdb prompt. The backtrace information will be more usable if you can recompile SIPE without optimization, i.e. with -g -O0

After upgrading to SIPE X.Y.Z ...

After upgrading to SIPE 1.22.x
Login fails with IPv6

You need to update to SIPE 1.23.0 (or newer). Windows users will need to update to SIPE 1.23.1 (or newer).

After upgrading to SIPE 1.23.x
Some of my buddies' photos stopped updating or don't show at all, even though I still see them in the Microsoft client

Those buddies are likely using a photo stored on publicly accessible URL instead of their Active Directory profile picture. SIPE has disabled downloading files from unknown sources on public internet by default because of a potential security risk.

If you really want to enable custom pictures, go to the Advanced tab of your account settings and tick Show profile pictures from web.

Connection problems

SIPE can't find any server to connect to
SIPE connects to the wrong server

This should only happen if the OCS installation you are trying to connect to is really non-standard, as SIPE tries the same order as the Microsoft Client, i.e.

  1. Lync Auto-discover protocol (via http(s)://... URLs and account credentials)
  2. DNS SRV records
  3. DNS A records

One common problem is that there is a clash between the auto-discovery for OCS and VoIP servers and VoIP has the higher priority.

If you run Pidgin with the --debug option then you'll be able to see which names & ports SIPE tries to look up. On a Linux/UNIX machine you can manually check using the following commands (replace .company.com with your domain):

$ host -tA lyncdiscoverinternal.company.com
$ host -tA lyncdiscover.company.com
$ host -tSRV _sipinternaltls._tcp.company.com
$ host -tSRV _sipinternal._tcp.company.com
$ host -tSRV _sip._tls.company.com
$ host -tSRV _sip._tcp.company.com
$ host -tA sipinternal.company.com
$ host -tA sipexternal.company.com
$ host -tA sip.company.com
$ host -tA company.com

If none of those return the correct server, then you need to enter the correct one into the Server[:Port] field on the Advanced tab of the account configuration.

That means your server is configured to accept only particular types of clients. Copy one of the following lines to the User Agent field in the Advanced tab of the account configuration and save. Then try to connect to the server again.

Version / Product User Agent values (as seen in the wild)
Lync 2016, Office 365 and
Skype for Business		 UCCAPI/16.0.6001.1073 OC/16.0.6001.1073 (Skype for Business)
Lync 2013, Office 365 and
Skype for Business		 UCCAPI/15.0.4745.1000 OC/15.0.4745.1000 (Skype for Business)
UCCAPI/15.0.4481.1000 OC/15.0.4481.1000 (Microsoft Lync)
UCCAPI/15.0.4420.1017 OC/15.0.4420.1017 (Microsoft Lync)
Lync 2010 and Office 365 UCCAPI/4.0.7577.314 OC/4.0.7577.314 (Microsoft Lync 2010)
UCCAPI/4.0.7577.256 OC/4.0.7577.280 (Microsoft Lync 2010)
Office Communicator 2007 R2 UCCAPI/3.5.6907.206 OC/3.5.6907.206 (Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2)
UCCAPI/3.5.6907.0 OC/3.5.6907.0 (Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2)
Office Communicator 2007 UCCP/2.0.6362.111 OC/2.0.6362.111 (Microsoft Office Communicator)
UCCP/2.0.6362.97 OC/2.0.6362.97 (Microsoft Office Communicator)
Office Communicator 2005 LCC/1.3.5371 (Microsoft Office Communicator 2005 1.0.559.0)
LCC/1.3.5371 (Microsoft Office Communicator 2005 1.0.559.232)

This page keeps track of user agent values for the Skype for Business client.

Login to my Microsoft Office 365 account is rejected with "Failed to authenticate to server" or "Incompatible authentication scheme chosen"

Microsoft has started to disable RC4 on their servers. You need to update to SIPE 1.20.0 (or newer) which adds AES-CBC support in TLS-DSK authentication.

For details see  SIPE bug report #285

Login to my Microsoft Office 365 account is rejected with "AADSTS53003: Blocked by conditional access"

Your organization has enabled Azure Active Directory conditional access features. At least one user has reported that the user agent string for HTTP requests is no longer ignored in this setup and causes the rejection.

You need to update to SIPE 1.24.0 (or newer). After that the User Agent field in the Advanced tab of the account configuration is also used for HTTP requests. It can thus be overridden to bypass the conditional access check.

Pretend to be client running on... User Agent addition (as reported to work in the wild)
Android phone Android
iPhone iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 99_9 like Mac OS X

You need to add the string at the end of the User Agent field, e.g. UCCAPI/16.0.6001.1073 OC/16.0.6001.1073 (Skype for Business) Android, i.e. SIPE pretends to be a SfB client on Android.

For defails see SIPE feature request #104.

Login fails with IPv6

SIP and SDP protocol messages differ if the SIP connection uses IPv4 or IPV6. IPv6 support has been added in SIPE 1.23.0.

Windows Pidgin has a bug that affects IPv6 sockets. A workaround has been added in SIPE 1.23.1.

For defails see SIPE feature request #99 and SIPE bug report #338.

Login fails with "Read Error"

This problem can be caused by the BEAST (CVE-2011-3389) mitigations implemented in TLS stacks.

For NSS you can set the environment variable NSS_SSL_CBC_RANDOM_IV=0 when running Pidgin to disable them:

$ export NSS_SSL_CBC_RANDOM_IV=0
$ pidgin

$ NSS_SSL_CBC_RANDOM_IV=0 pidgin

Adium users can disable the BEAST mitigations on the Advanced tab of the account settings.

NOTE: nowadays all Lync servers should have an up-to-date SSL stack without this problem. It is likely that something else causes this error message.

Account keeps on disconnecting randomly

Compared to network connections created by Browsers the SIP connection used by SIPE is long lived, I.e. the connection needs to stay open until the user goes offline.

Some environments unfortunately have network elements that reset active connections they consider "idle". This causes the SIPE account to disconnect randomly. A network monitor program, like tcpdump or Wireshark, applied to the SIP connection created by SIPE will show a TCP RST message.

Some root causes that have been identified in the past by SIPE users:

  • personal firewall on the machine with incorrect connection tracking settings
  • corporate firewalls or intrusion detection systems

Setup problems

Where do I get the login credentials for my Microsoft Online (BPOS) account?

On a Windows machine, where you have used the official Office Communicator client, go to

Control Panel
-> User Accounts
-> Credentials Manager

and expand the arrow for *.ocslabs.microsoft.com. The User Name from the certificate will be your Login Name in the Basic tab of the account settings. For User Name use your company email address and for Password your company Windows password.

It has been reported that the Server[:Port] setting in the Advanced tab of the account settings has to be pool1.oconline.microsoftonline.com:443 for BPOS accounts.

File Transfer problems

I can receive files but sending files fails

Before Lync 2013: the old protocol requires that TCP ports 6891 to 6901 are accessible on the sending side. If you use a firewall then you need to add rules to open those ports.

For Lync 2013 or newer SIPE uses the new Lync File Transfer protocol, if supported. Please open the About SIPE plugin... window. If the first line does not contain the word Lync FT then your version of SIPE has not been compiled with Lync File Transfer support.

Voice & Video call problems

I get the error message "488 Encryption Levels not compatible" when trying to set up an audio/video call

Please open the About SIPE plugin... window. If the first line does not contain the word SRTP then your version of SIPE has not been compiled with V&V encryption support.

Call setup errors
Call setup succeeds but there is no audio

In order for SIPE to correctly support V&V connections you have to make sure that all necessary GStreamer 1.0 plugins have been installed on your machine. The following table lists the minimum set of plugins recommended by the SIPE project:

Plugin Debian/Ubuntu & friends Fedora & friends
avenc_g722 gstreamer1.0-libav gstreamer1-libav
avdec_g722 gstreamer1.0-libav gstreamer1-libav
avdec_h264 gstreamer1.0-libav gstreamer1-libav
fsrtpconference libfarstream-0.2 farstream02
nicesink gstreamer1.0-nice libnice-gstreamer1
nicesrc gstreamer1.0-nice libnice-gstreamer1
rtpg722depay libgstreamer-plugins-good1.0 gstreamer1-plugins-good
rtpg722pay libgstreamer-plugins-good1.0 gstreamer1-plugins-good
rtph264depay libgstreamer-plugins-good1.0 gstreamer1-plugins-good
rtph264pay libgstreamer-plugins-good1.0 gstreamer1-plugins-good
srtp libgstreamer-plugins-bad1.0 gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free
srtpenc libgstreamer-plugins-bad1.0 gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free
ximagesink libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0 gstreamer1-plugins-base
xvimagesink libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0 gstreamer1-plugins-base
x264enc gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly gstreamer1-plugins-ugly

To check if a plugin from the above list is installed use the following command (using srtpenc as an example)

$ gst-inspect-1.0 srtpenc
No such element or plugin 'srtpenc'

If you see the above message then please install the package listed in the table. Please note that on some Linux distributions Gstreamer 1.0 packages may have been splitted into an Open Source package variant, e.g. -bad-free, and a legally encumbered package variant, e.g. -bad, which are located in different package repositories.

Also the libnice package on your system needs to be up-to-date. At the time of this writing the last official release 0.1.14 is rather old and many important fixes for SIPE are missing. For full SIPE functionality the source code for the libnice package

Video call setup fails with the error message "Error with your webcam"

There are some known bugs in other packages that prevent setting up a video call with SIPE. If you see this error message you should check if one of those bugs isn't fixed in the packages for your OS yet:

Video call connects, but Pidgin exits randomly after a few seconds

Please take a debug log and check the end of the file. If you see the following messages

[xcb] Unknown request in queue while dequeuing
[xcb] Most likely this is a multi-threaded client and XInitThreads has not been called
[xcb] Aborting, sorry about that.
pidgin: xcb_io.c:165: dequeue_pending_request: Assertion `!xcb_xlib_unknown_req_in_deq' failed.

then the GStreamer 1.0 video output plugin that you have currently configured in Pidgin (Tools -> Voice/Video Settings -> Input and Output Settings -> Video -> Output) is multi-threaded but does not call XInitThreads(). You can try the following two things to fix the issue:

  • if you have selected OpenGL as the video output plugin, then you need to set the environment variable GST_GL_XINITTHREADS=1 when running Pidgin.
  • switch to the X Window System (Xv) video output plugin, which is not multi-threaded.

Operating Systems

Windows

Why is there no Windows MSI installer package?

None of the developers has a Windows development system at his disposal. The only way to create Windows release packages at the moment is by cross-compiling the code on a Linux system. That approach only supports the creation of NSIS installer packages.

How do I get logs from the official Microsoft client?

The official client stores its log files under C:\Documents and Settings\<WIN_LOGIN>\Tracing.

Version
Lync there is a configuration option to turn on logging.
OCS 2007 there is a configuration option to turn on logging. (BROKEN LINK)
OCS 2005 follow these instructions to turn on logging

Login fails with "Read Error"

See Connection Problems

Mac

How do I get Office Communicator support working on a Mac?

There are two options

Login fails with "Read Error"

See Connection Problems

Account does not auto-connect or re-connect
Account connects when no network is available

The auto-connect feature in Adium requires a valid server host name. When you use server auto-discovery, i.e. the server field in the account settings is empty, then SIPE can't determine the server host name without a network connection. SIPE therefore provides the fixed host name adium.im to Adium. Auto-connect will not work when you are in an intranet-only environment.

For details see SIPE bug #262

Adium plugin crashes on OS X 10.13 (or newer)

You need to update to SIPE 1.23.0 (or newer).

For details see SIPE feature request #101

Linux/*BSD/UNIX/...

Although I have configured my machine to use pam_winbind, SIPE continues to ask for my NTLM password

While the NTLM Single Sign-On support offered by Samba works fine for Firefox, Evolution, libsoup, ..., it doesn't support Message Integrity Code generation & verification, which is required by [MS-SIP].

SIPE has support for GSS-NTLMSSP which enables Single Sign-On for NTLM. Please make sure it is available on your system when you compile SIPE source code.

Login fails with "Read Error"

See Connection Problems

Other

Contact search does not show expected results

It seems that [MS-DLX] SearchOn feature is broken, at least for some Office365 accounts. The server only returns 0 or 1 results, even if there should be more matches. Also partial matches do not work.

The only known workaround is to enter a partial name. That will trigger a retry with a search over all attributes, which isn't as exact and will return too many results.

For details see SIPE bug #349

All my buddies are shown as offline from one day to the next
Changes to my buddy list aren't saved

Your account or installation has been upgraded to Lync 2013. It has a new feature called Unified Contact Store (UCS) and your contact list has been migrated to it. Please make sure that you are using the latest version of SIPE.

I get the error message "Unable to resolve DNS SRV record" when joining a conference using a http(s)://... URL

Your setup uses a non-standard URL template for meeting invitations from which SIPE can't extract the correct information to join the conference. Please use your web browser to open the URL and use the conf:sip:... or sip:... URI from that page to join the conference.

For details see SIPE bug #273

UPDATE "Skype for Business": The URL points to a web page that does not include any URI in the HTML text. It is only revealed when the user presses a button on the web page. You will have to manually copy this URI.

For details see this Help forum entry

By default the information from my calendar is published. How do I disable this feature?

Go to the account settings, switch to the Advanced tab and then tick the Don't publish my calendar information box.

Why do I have to use Pidgin and not Empathy/KDE Telepathy/... to use SIPE?
Why does Empathy/KDE Telepathy/... not show Office Communcator in the account setup?
Can I use SIPE with Empathy/KDE Telepathy/...?

Empathy is based on the Telepathy framework. SIPE is a Pidgin protocol plugin, i.e. it is based on the libpurple API. Code for one framework is incompatible with the other. But there is a telepathy communication manager, called telepathy-haze that implements an adaptor to the libpurple API. If you install the telepathy-haze package then you'll see (most of) the Pidgin protocol plugins also in Empathy.

Please be sure to read up on the issue of certificate handling for telepathy-haze, because that will require manual intervention by the user if you want to connect to your Office Communication account from Empathy.

NOTE: a native telepathy backend for SIPE is under development. But at the time of this writing it is too incomplete to be usable by end users.

Related

Forums: Web ticket request failed; Skype for Business 2016 / Lync (Windows 10)
Wiki: Home
Wiki: How to setup an account

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