PHP fsockopen() error

Hey Tim,

If your install is hosted in a shared environment, the server IP may be blocked by Google for email abuse or some such.

Given that the server tech had timeouts connecting to Google, and it worked with other web servers, I'd think that to be the cause - however, there could be other causes. If the server tech ran his test script on the shared hosting account, that would further back up my thought of the IP being blacklisted by Google. It could also be the web hosts network IP's being blocked for abusive traffic going to Google.

You can modify that file in CMSB temporarily to connect to other hosts for some self testing.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Steve

Hey Tim, I just re-read the end of your post stating that you tried that demo file from the other forum post and it worked with a TCP connection to google...

It could be an intermittent latency issue.

Hi Tim,

It could be an isolated anomaly or it could be indicative of larger problems with the hosts network.

If you're rushed, you can just comment out that line in /lib/init.php by adding // like this

//  _init_displaySocketErrors();

Or if you have some time to investigate further, I'd try changing the line in /lib/init.php to try other hosts: 

$handle = @fsockopen("tcp://www.google.com", 80, $errno, $errstr, 5);

And try some other hosts such as:  google.com (no www), www.googleapis.com, (used by the wysiwyg spellchecker),  yahoo.com, facebook.com

And try the IP for google.com, which for me is 173.194.33.113 as returned by ping: 

C:\Users\Dave>ping www.google.com

Pinging www.google.com [173.194.33.113] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 173.194.33.113: bytes=32 time=14ms TTL=56

Or use this PHP script to see what IP your web host thinks google is using: 

<?php
  header("Content-type: text/plain");
  echo `ping -c 3 www.google.com`;
  exit;
?>


Worst case you'll just have some issues using plugins or features that require internet access, like the wysiwyg spell checker or createPDF.  Or maybe it's just google they can't connect to.  That would be odd, though.  And to confirm, if your last post you meant to say the test script couldn't connect to www.google.com either as well right?  We'd want to look into it if one script could connect and another couldn't.

Hope that helps, let me know if you find out anything interesting.

Hey Dave. I'm on the road, so will try your tests later today. My post was correct, I get an error on install, but the test file works fine. 

Hi All, 

For anyone else with a similar issue we've tracked it down to a configuration issue with the host.  The particular issue was that IPv6 was enabled so requests to internet servers were getting IPv6 addresses instead of IPv4 but the IPv6 traffic was being blocked at the firewall or otherwise not getting outside the network.

I've added some code to the next release that tries to connect to both google.com and google's IPv4 IP address to detect when IPv6 configuration issues are preventing things from working.

Cheers!