Windows 8 installer: Sever is not running and has been grayed out

[benjaoming]

From @BabluKumar17 on November 6, 2016 3:36

Summary

I successfully downloaded KA Lite first time in Windows and then when I ran it as an administrator it asked for a password and I typed in my password in cmd. But I noticed in the nofication, the Start Server has been grayed out.

System information

Please specify the KA Lite version you were using and your operating system!

• Operating system: ? Windows 8.1, 64 bit
• Version: 0.16.? Yes!
• Browser: ? Chrome

Screenshots

Copied from original issue: learningequality/ka-lite#5334

[benjaoming]

From @radinamatic on November 7, 2016 8:2

Hi @BabluKumar17!

Please confirm that you installed the latest release 0.16.9 of KA Lite!

Did you see a Windows Firewall notification about giving permission for a Python process when you tried to run KA Lite the first time after the installation? If the python.exe process is not permitted to run, KA Lite server will not start.

Do you see any python.exe process running? Right click the task bar and select Task Manager from the contextual menu, and check the Processes tab.

[benjaoming]

From @BabluKumar17 on November 9, 2016 12:14

@radinamatic: Thanks for your help.
I tried your approach too. But, unfortunately nothing worked. I have also turned off my firewall but I do not see any python.exe file running in Task Manager.

[benjaoming]

It seems important to look at the reason for this issue - all options appear to be greyed out, but there's no user feedback explaining why.

IMO, the first step is to ensure that when this and other errors happen, there is a message box, log file or some other user-oriented feedback that explains what's going on :) Otherwise it's really hard both for the users and for us devs.

Would you be able to take it from here, @cpauya ?

[radinamatic]

@BabluKumar17
I just installed 0.16.9 on a fresh Windows 8.1 virtual machine. This is the screenshot of the Firewall alert that you need to accept upon KA Lite installation:

And you should have 2 python processes running together with KA Lite:

Could you check if you have python listed in the Windows Firewall apps with access allowed?

[benjaoming]

@radinamatic - curious: What are the symptoms, when you /don't/ accept it? :)

[radinamatic]

@benjaoming I'm not in front of that VM at the moment to retest, but if I recall well from past testing, they correspond roughly to what this user described, namely, options to Start/Stop the server would be grayed out in the KA Lite notification area menu.