IPN fails – PayPal say that most likely script is not closing fsock correctly

[adamb]

Hi,

Hope you can help.

I have been having issues for a couple of months with IPNs failing (I have been using it for a while in live mode and recently tested it in Sandbox too). We receive the PayPal payment received email, but no buyer or seller notification emails arrive.

I checked the debug box in settings but the logs are empty when I make a test sale.

I have checked our estore and PayPal settings and it seems to be set-up correctly (rechecked several times). I believe estore handles the ipn so I left the PayPal ipn settings as default, although when it kept failing I tried to enter the URL path to the estore paypal script but PayPal came back with a could not validate message.

We have also been onto our hosting provider for weeks now and they say everything is fine server side. There are no error logs and they have checked the firewall, everything they can check to do with the server. The strange thing is that we were on a semi-dedicated server up until July when we migrated to a dedicated server (with the same webhost) and since then we have had issues with ipn failing, not just our sites but our clients too who are on that server. Before the move we rarely had any issues.

Our webhost has been on to PayPal and PayPal advised us to set-up a Sandbox account and make some test transactions so they could check the IPN logs. I made 5 test transactions in sandbox, first one worked and the following four failed. PayPal came back today saying “As you can see your server is responding nicely with a http 200 and the next ones are failing with no HTTP Response. This indicates that most likely your script is not closing the fsock session correctly. You will need to adjust you script and make sure that it is closing hte fsock session”.

Another thing I did do today is update to the recent version of estore v6.1.4 because of the recent “PayPal Sanbox changes” post here https://support.tipsandtricks-hq.com/forums/topic/paypal-sandbox-changes but still failing.

I certainly don’t know about fsock apart from that it is enabled on our server and with our webhost saying they’ve checked everything they can to do with the server, not sure what to do next (apart from move to another hosting provider if we can’t get this resolved).

Just to mention, we did try the plugin in live mode on another webhost and it worked as it should, we received the PayPal email, seller email and the buyer got there’s too. We did this to show that the issue was connected to the server we are on rather than the plugin but it didn’t convince our webhost.

We are stuck now as to what the cause of this issue could be. Any help would be most appreciated. Also, could it possibly be an issue with fsock session not closing as indicated by PayPal.

Many thanks

Adam

[wzp]

Have you tried this advice?

https://support.tipsandtricks-hq.com/forums/topic/what-to-do-if-the-debug-file-is-empty

[adamb]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply.

I tried the advice in that post the other day and just tried it again with no luck.

I get to step 5 where I put the IPN URL in the Sandbox simulator and I receive the message “IPN delivery failed. Unable to connect to the specified URL. Please verify the URL and try again”.

I told this to our webhost but they still aren’t convinced it’s their server as they say they have checked everything they can possibly think of.

They even contacted PayPal themselves and PayPal asked us to do test sales in the Sandbox environment and from the failed IPNs they said “This indicates that most likely your script is not closing the fsock session correctly. You will need to adjust you script and make sure that it is closing hte fsock session”.

This is where we are up to now with both PayPal and our webhost thinking it’s to do with the script. I even tried putting our website URLs in the IPN notification field within PayPal account but a message appears saying the URL can’t be validated.

I also know that PayPal advised our webhost to whitelist some of their IPs but even that didn’t solve the issue.

Any further help would be really appreciated.

Many thanks

Adam

[wzp]

Well, since you mentioned sandbox and IPN in the same breath, there is always this possibility…

https://support.tipsandtricks-hq.com/forums/topic/paypal-sandbox-changes#post-24135

[adamb]

Hi,

Still having no luck with this.

I upgraded to the new version this morning, but to double check I just did a fresh install and did another test transaction in Sandbox and the ipn retries about 8 times and then fails.

Any other ideas you can think of? Really appreciate the help on this.

Many thanks

Adam

[admin]

The script closes the fsock correctly… remember this plugin is used by thousands of users so it is more likely that your server configuration of your hosting account is incorrect (I have seen a few server’s with messed up configurations).

There is an easy test you can do to isolate the issue. Don’t even use the plugin (you don’t need to use this plugin to test if PayPal can send the IPN through to your server). Simply try sending the IPN to your home page using the Sandbox IPN sending tools and see if it can send it the IPN successfully to your site. If the sandbox IPN sending tool says that is failed to send the IPN then you know where the problem lies.

Also post a URL to your site so I can check this myself.

[adamb]

Hi,

Thank you for confirming what we’ve been trying to say to our webhost. We’ve been getting nowhere so far, although must admit our webhost have been doing their best to help. However, they are reluctant to accept that it may be their server at fault.

As you suggested, I tried to send the IPN to our homepage using the Sandbox IPN tool and again receive the message “IPN delivery failed. Unable to connect to the specified URL. Please verify the URL and try again”.

The website is currently in development but here’s the URL [http://www.royaltyfreemusic.uk.com]

Thanks very much for your help and any additional thoughts you may have about this would be most appreciated.

Many thanks

Adam

[admin]

Well that should prove to your webhost that PayPal is even failing to send the IPN to the server altogether. There is no plugins involved so they can’t play the blame game anymore. If your server is not configured correctly to receive PayPal’s IPN then there is nothing we can do from our plugin unfortunately.

I do know that if PayPal does not receive the correct response from the server when an IPN is sent, it will fail. So tell your hosting provider to look into that side of things too.

[Author]

Posts