SSL to api.www.ads-software.com not connecting

  • I am brand new to WordPress. I have a brand new install of 4.5.2. I have successfully installed WordPress and connected to the database. The site itself works fine. My problem is with the dashboard. Before installing any themes or plugins, I noticed no themes or plugins showed up when I clicked the Add New button. Since then, I have manually installed the Salient theme and Salient Visual Composer plugin. I have spent hours going through forums trying to determine why I can’t see or search for plugins or themes via the dashboard. Meanwhile, I’ve noticed the dashboard takes 30 – 60 seconds to fully load each page. I’ve turned on debug in wp-config and all the log messages point to a problem connecting to api.www.ads-software.com. On almost every page of the dashboard, I get a variation of this message:

    “( ! ) Warning: An unexpected error occurred. Something may be wrong with www.ads-software.com or this server’s configuration. If you continue to have problems, please try the support forums. (WordPress could not establish a secure connection to www.ads-software.com. Please contact your server administrator.) in /zdata/apache/docroot/wp-includes/update.php on line 479″.

    This is followed by a list of functions, times and locations. All of them end up pointing to calls to api.www.ads-software.com. The website is hosted on a server owned and run by the company I work for. I am not the server admin and know nothing about PHP/Apache server configurations. The network is behind a firewall and proxy. I will need to relay any suggestions to my network admins. Here’s what I have tried so far.

    • Using the dashboard on the proxy network, company wi-fi (no proxy), as well as other wi-fi networks unrelated to my company.
    • Adding the WP_PROXY HOST, PORT, USERNAME, PASSWORD and BYPASS_HOSTS code to wp-config
    • Increasing the timeout for the call to api.www.ads-software.com to 90 seconds. This just caused it to take longer to display the error message.
    • Disabling the one plugin running and switching the theme to 2016.
    • Had the network admins turn on proxy access to the server group.
    • Confirmed SSL certificate is installed.
    • Confirmed WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL) are set to HTTPS
    • Added ‘define(‘FORCE_SSL_ADMIN’, true);’ to wp-config

    At this point, my network admins do not know what to do. They do not have experience with WordPress. I think the problem has something to do with the server configuration but I don’t know what needs to be changed.

Viewing 10 replies - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)

  • Can you run these commands from the server ??

    ping api.www.ads-software.com

    telnet api.www.ads-software.com 443

    Thread Starter megbiw

    (@megbiw)

    The response from the network admins is “Neither of the commands will work due to our corporate security policy that requires all outbound traffic to go through the http proxy servers.” What he did try was disabling HTTPS in wp-admin/includes/plugin-install.php by commenting out ‘$url = set_url_scheme( $url, ‘https’ );’. He said that worked. But I don’t want HTTPS disabled.

    Thread Starter megbiw

    (@megbiw)

    I just found out I had the setting wrong for WP_PROXY_HOST. Once I corrected that, all the debug messages stopped. Now I just get “An unexpected error occurred. Something may be wrong with www.ads-software.com or this server’s configuration. If you continue to have problems, please try the support forums.”

    Now if I comment out ‘set_url_scheme’ in wp-admin/includes/plugin-install.php, I can see some of the plugins but I get a bunch of different debug codes like “Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /zdata/apache/docroot/wp-includes/update.php on line 315”. I’m still not sure why the server cannot communicate with api.www.ads-software.com via HTTPS.

    Have you tried disabling ssl for plugins repo only using plugins_api_args filter?

    // add it to the theme's functions.php file

add_filter( 'plugins_api_args', function ( $args, $action ) {
	$args->is_ssl = false;
	return $args;
} );
    Thread Starter megbiw

    (@megbiw)

    I tried it and nothing changed. I’m not really sure why it would since my problem is with the dashboard, not the theme I am using. The inability of the dashboard to connect to api.www.ads-software.com via SSL is present even in a brand new install of WordPress on our network. So the issue is not related to a specific plugin or theme which I have already tried disabling anyhow. I’m guessing there is some sort of setting on the server side that needs to be changed but I have no idea what it could be. The network admins think it is something in the PHP code so they are not helping much right now.

    In wordpress, you use function.php file of the active theme to add custom filters which is why the above code should be added to that file.

    This should disable ssl when connecting to the wordpress api for plugin info.

    If there is a network security policy in place that prevent requests from being sent to the wp servers then the only option I can think of now if to use a proxy server.

    Thread Starter megbiw

    (@megbiw)

    The proxy server settings are already in place and it still does not work.

    Did you get to the bottom of this issue.. I have the exact same error and it only happened once I enabled SSL on the server.. Now the dashboard will not update plugins and also my SMTP plugin is broken and it all seems to be down to the server not resolving the addresses properly when SSL is enabled.

    Thread Starter megbiw

    (@megbiw)

    No, I was not able to solve the problem.

    Michael

    (@bamboo-media)

    I know this thread is a bit old but I had this problem, with a dev machine that had a local WordPress install on the LAN. I found that SSL decryption was enabled on our Sophos firewall and I had to create an exception for https://api.www.ads-software.com/* to get it to work correctly. The other option is to get your firewall admin to turn off SSL decryption completely!

Viewing 10 replies - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)
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