Good afternoon!

I'm running LimeSurvey Version 2.50+ Build 160728 on Amazon Web Services. I currently have an Elastic Load Balancer pointing to an EC2 running as an application server in a private subnet. The database is kept on an RDS instance running in a separate private backend subnet. Neither the application server or the managed database are kept in subnets with outgoing access to the internet, all requests are filtered through the load balancer.

This setup works perfectly, except I've noticed that when logging in, after submitting credentials the process hangs and times out each time. However, if I hit refresh, the admin dashboard appears, showing the authentication process worked. As soon as I attach an internet gateway to the private frontend subnet, allowing the application server to reach the internet, the login process works as it should.

Is there a specific process that occurs during admin login that requires LimeSurvey to reach the internet, and if so, is there a way to shut it off for security purposes?

Thank you!

First, you should update

The comfortUpdate try to find updates when loggin in. So, if in your configuration calls to external servers are blocked without being immediately rejected, the login will loop until the max time request is reached (which in your case, seems to be never reached).

So, just toggle to false this setting:
github.com/LimeSurvey/LimeSurvey/blob/ma...nfig/version.php#L18

Great to know! Thank you for the fix! And yes, we are updating today.