Details:
Signals Clinical has a configuration page where you define data connection to an external data source (types can be FTP or Medidata Rave). The external data source is provided by the customer's Electronic Data Capture (EDC) or Clinical Data Management System (CDMS) partner. On this page you specify the server hostname of your external data source along with port, username and password (obtained from partner). When clicking the Test Configuration button, it may fail to create the connection, with the following message: "The configuration is not valid - review it and test again".
Solution:
Try connecting as standalone, externally from Signals Clinical. WinSCP is one such tool to use for this. In WinSCP it may be helpful to adjust Minimum and Maximum allowed TLS versions for the communication (in Advanced Settings).
Use a network-traffic analyzer tool to see if it can report why the connection fails. If your connection is to an FTP server, then note Pure-FTPd provides logging at the command line that reports detail progress when it establishes the TLS connection.
In a customer scenario where a data connection was failing to connect to their CDMS's FTP server, the Pure-FTPd logging showed that the CDMS's FTP server was trying to use a security cipher that has a 1048-bit key. Newer versions of TLS require a key size of 2048-bit. The solution in this case was to enhance the security capabilities of the SDMS FTP server so that it could communicate using protocols allowed by Signals Clinical.
Signals Clinical 3.0 does not allow communication using TLS versions 1.0 or 1.1; these are deemed to be insecure. TLS v1.2 or higher is required.