Requests to HPB service sometimes can't be validated / accounts marked "expired"

[fancycode]

How to use GitHub

• Please use the 👍 reaction to show that you are affected by the same issue.
• Please don't comment if you have no relevant information to add. It's just extra noise for everyone subscribed to this issue.
• Subscribe to receive notifications on status change and new comments.

---

Sometimes it happens that a request to the HPB service to update the account properties can not be validated by the HPB service (

spreed/lib/Controller/HostedSignalingServerController.php

Line 62 in 0526b72

return new DataResponse(null, Http::STATUS_PRECONDITION_FAILED);

). If this happens the HPB service request returns a 401 Unauthorized which causes the account to be marked as "expired". This causes confusion with customers that see a notification about the expired account (that still can be used successfully).

While it's a bug that the validation fails, also accounts should not be marked as "expired" then.

[fancycode]

Is there some sort of caching enabled for the config values that is not invalidated in some cases?

I added logging 'Stored nonce for auth: ' . storedNonce here:

spreed/lib/Controller/HostedSignalingServerController.php

Line 56 in 2b03f45

if ($storedNonce !== '') {

Logging 'Stored nonce to fetch account: ' . $nonce here:

spreed/lib/Service/HostedSignalingServerService.php

Line 228 in 2b03f45

$this->config->setAppValue('spreed', 'hosted-signaling-server-nonce', $nonce);

Logging 'Deleted nonce to fetch account: ' . $nonce here:

spreed/lib/Service/HostedSignalingServerService.php

Line 319 in 2b03f45

$this->config->deleteAppValue('spreed', 'hosted-signaling-server-nonce');

For the cases where a request from the HPB service could not be authenticated, the nonce is empty when read from the controller:

{"reqId":"5VgVVlIFyFvl5T7lF05O","level":3,"time":"2025-10-29T19:10:01+00:00","remoteAddr":"","user":"--","app":"spreed","method
":"","url":"--","message":"Stored nonce to fetch account: bTfJj4mHq02ZzB3/j28T63W4XIZTkUC8","userAgent":"--","version":"32.0.1.
2","data":{"app":"spreed"}}
{"reqId":"omwZ1ocDFJ2bDeDfQ9mr","level":3,"time":"2025-10-29T19:10:01+00:00","remoteAddr":"x.x.x.x","user":"--","app":"
spreed","method":"POST","url":"/ocs/v2.php/apps/spreed/api/v1/hostedsignalingserver/auth","message":"Stored nonce for auth: ","
userAgent":"spreed-hpbservice/28d0becbf35b70c638ca81d0601b503635b751ec","version":"32.0.1.2","data":{"app":"spreed"}}
{"reqId":"5VgVVlIFyFvl5T7lF05O","level":3,"time":"2025-10-29T19:10:01+00:00","remoteAddr":"","user":"--","app":"spreed","method
":"","url":"--","message":"Deleted nonce to fetch account: bTfJj4mHq02ZzB3/j28T63W4XIZTkUC8","userAgent":"--","version":"32.0.1
.2","data":{"app":"spreed"}}

I'm running Nextcloud 32.0.1 with Talk 22.0.1. These are my caching settings in config.php:

  'memcache.local' => '\\OC\\Memcache\\APCu',
  'memcache.distributed' => '\\OC\\Memcache\\Redis',
  'memcache.locking' => '\\OC\\Memcache\\Redis',

[fancycode]

Thanks to @SystemKeeper this was tracked down to AppConfig caching introduced in NC 32 (see nextcloud/server#54383).

As a workaround, the option cache_app_config can be set to false in config.php:
https://github.com/nextcloud/server/blob/7a7d0b10392a64e022a80d825ff624ca4d4d77dd/config/config.sample.php#L1844-L1851

[fancycode]

As a serverside workaround, we added a 5 second delay to the HPB service before sending the auth-request to Talk, making sure the AppConfig cache always loads the values from the database.

This seems to fix the issue in the meantime for affected setups.

[nickvergessen]

I still don't see where this might be coming from.
We could try to migrate the code to OCP\AppFramework\Services\IAppConfig with a string typed value, to see if that makes a difference?