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NovaVMS Manual

Gateway shows "Offline"

Gateway shows “Offline”

Symptom

On the Gateways page, a gateway row shows a red dot with the status Offline. Every camera attached to that gateway is also showing Offline. The cloud UI’s Last seen timestamp for the gateway is older than one minute.

Likely causes

  1. The gateway process has crashed or stopped. The systemd unit is inactive or the Docker container exited.
  2. The gateway has lost network connectivity. The on-premise machine cannot reach the cloud over the internet.
  3. The cloud rejected the gateway’s WebSocket. The gateway token is invalid, revoked, or the gateway’s clock is skewed more than 5 minutes from UTC.

Fix

You need SSH access to the gateway host for the steps below. If you do not, escalate to whoever installed it.

Step 1 — Check the service state

SSH to the gateway host and check the service:

Terminal window
sudo systemctl status novavms-gateway
  • active (running): the process is up — skip to Step 3 (network).
  • inactive (dead) or failed: continue to Step 2.

For Docker-based gateways:

Terminal window
docker ps --filter name=novavms-gateway

If the container is missing, run docker ps -a to check exit status.

Step 2 — If the service is down, tail the log and restart

Terminal window
sudo journalctl -u novavms-gateway -n 200 --no-pager
sudo systemctl restart novavms-gateway

For Docker:

Terminal window
docker logs novavms-gateway --tail 200
docker restart novavms-gateway

Common failure lines in the log:

  • dial tcp: lookup novavms.novalien.com: no such host — DNS broken on the host.
  • token rejected — the gateway pairing token was revoked. Re-pair from the Gateways page.
  • time skew exceeds 5 minutes — system clock is wrong. Run sudo timedatectl set-ntp true.

Step 3 — If the service is running but the cloud still shows Offline

  1. From the gateway host, test cloud reachability:
    Terminal window
    curl -sS https://novavms.novalien.com/api/v1/health
    Expect {"status":"ok"}. If you get a timeout or TLS error, the gateway’s network is blocking outbound HTTPS.
  2. Verify the gateway’s outbound ports. NovaVMS gateways need outbound 443 (WebSocket + HTTPS) and 3478 (STUN) open.
  3. If reachability is fine, restart the service one more time to force a fresh WebSocket handshake:
    Terminal window
    sudo systemctl restart novavms-gateway

Verify

  1. The gateway’s dot turns green within 60 seconds of the restart.
  2. Cameras behind it recover to green one by one as the gateway re-probes them.
  3. The gateway’s Last seen timestamp is within the last minute.
  4. sudo journalctl -u novavms-gateway -n 20 shows no repeated error lines.

If none of this worked

Collect the last 1000 log lines and the service state:

Terminal window
sudo journalctl -u novavms-gateway -n 1000 --no-pager > gateway.log
sudo systemctl status novavms-gateway >> gateway.log

Attach gateway.log, the gateway’s hostname, and the Gateway ID from the Gateways page to a ticket at support.novalien.com.

See also: