WP plugin needs to phone home with my license key to verify, but it cannot talk to home base.
Host says no blockage to the ip, plugin author says no blockage to my host ip.
Using a simple ping script, I cannot ping the auth server IP from my host server. Have tried traceroute scripts but no worky.
Steps to determine where the problem is?
Have you looked at the port being used? If you're trying to go out on 49k+, and a firewall somewhere is set to reject UDP traffic, that might do it for instance
I don't see any port info in the ping script.
Also, plugin has been working fine for over a year. Stopped working on several sites on this host account/ip all at once.
Do you know for sure that license server is up and running. Have you tried pinging it from you work station?
Quote from: JasonD on November 23, 2010, 06:49:43 PM
when we say ping, I presume you actually mean an http connection.
Do you have the part of the code that calls home to show us ?
shell_exec("ping -c 1 $ip");
The plugin is encoded, so no access to source.
>Do you know for sure that license server is up and running. Have you tried pinging it from you work station?
Yes, and plugin works fine on other hosts.
I finally got the host to run a tracert from the box, and it gets all the way to the auth server host domain and stops, so it looks like a block there.
traceroute to <tracert removed to protect the innocent>
Yep, I think you're right, as the picture becomes clear.
He says the version of the plugin was an old one which constantly asked for auth. Several sites running this version from this ip, probably looked like a dos attack.
Why the plugin doesn't show a new version in the dash will be my last question once resolved. (he has a ticket in for checking the block.)
Sounds like you're on the right track Dras, but whenever inter-server connections mysteriously cease for me, it's usually caused by the APF firewall having blocked some "suspicious" activity.
Cleaning out the deny_hosts file of the "offending" IP and adding it to the whitelists takes care of it.
>Why the plugin doesn't show a new version in the dash will be my last question once resolved.
Although that is possible and happens automatically for plugins in the wordpress.org directory, it takes a better than average WP developer to make that happen for plugins hosted outside the WP directory.
Well, got it all sorted, ip was blocked automagically. Now fixed. Without that tracert the dev was going to give up, and seemed to get a bit peeved at me. Since it was his end, in the end, he gave me a free copy of another plugin ($80) I wanted. (he didn't know that, just a good will gesture)
>it's usually caused by the APF firewall having blocked some "suspicious" activity.
Thanks, I'll remember this.
>it takes a better than average WP developer to make that happen for plugins hosted outside the WP directory.
Yeah, and that's ok, but an email letting me know would have been fine. Have had other emails with lesser (and greater) features/fixes but nothing about this one.
Part of the issue is the sites are elf built/maintained and if the dash doesn't show a new version they don't know to go looking for it. If the email I get doesn't say "update or BROKEN/problem" I'm liable to wait since another version will be out in 1-3 months anyway. If it ain't broke...