Connection to www.ads-software.com Refused

  • butterflyman

    (@butterflyman)


    6 years ago

    I have worked on this problem for two days with our ISP, who hosts our dedicated server. This problem affects all of our clients’ WordPress sites we are hosting on our server, as well as our own.

    The bottom line is that for some connections, but not all, www.ads-software.com refuses connection from our server. Example: This WordPress site <https://www.citywheelchairs.com&gt; hosted on our server reaches out to check the version of WordPress and installed plugins, and says they’re all up-to-date. But clicking on “Add Plugins” gets a “connection refused by www.ads-software.com.” Same problem with RSS feed. Once I get that “Connection Refused” message, an “Upload Plugin” button appears, and I can manually upload and install.

    Our ISP support has tried every test and setting, studied the PHP error logs, and we aren’t getting any errors.

    Health Check is all good until it tests the connection to WordPress:

    Communication with www.ads-software.com: Unable to reach www.ads-software.com at 198.143.164.252: cURL error 7: Failed to connect to www.ads-software.com port 443: Connection refused

    HTTPS status: You are accessing this website using HTTPS.

    Secure communication: Your WordPress install can communicate securely with other services.

    Scheduled events: No scheduled events have been missed.

    Background updates:
    No version control systems were detected.
    Your installation of WordPress doesn’t require FTP credentials to perform updates.
    Couldn’t retrieve a list of the checksums for WordPress 4.9.2. This could mean that connections are failing to www.ads-software.com.

    Now, here’s the evidence that it’s www.ads-software.com refusing these connections. The ISP duplicated the cURL call to Google, with success:

    root@server [~]# curl google.com
    <HTML><HEAD><meta http-equiv=”content-type” content=”text/html;charset=utf-8″>
    <TITLE>301 Moved</TITLE></HEAD><BODY>
    <H1>301 Moved</H1>
    The document has moved
    here.
    </BODY></HTML>

    Here’s the result of the identical action for www.ads-software.com. The same fail happens with port 80:

    root@server [~]# curl https://www.ads-software.com
    curl: (7) Failed to connect to www.ads-software.com port 443: Connection refused
    root@server [~]#

    RSS Feed:

    RSS Error: WP HTTP Error: cURL error 7: Failed to connect to www.ads-software.com port 80: Connection refused

    RSS Error: WP HTTP Error: cURL error 7: Failed to connect to planet.www.ads-software.com port 443: Connection refused

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 5 replies - 16 through 20 (of 20 total)
  • Ali Darwich

    (@tokyobiyori)

    SUPER-O EL MOPO

    Thanks so much for your swift reply! Hmmm, see, here’s the thing:

    -It works from my MacBook
    -It works from my VM
    -It works from my phone

    The flag thing was just to check how does curl communicate from the plugins with the server, or why you’re getting a connection refused, but since you’re getting an error without an input and it works from other places, then there’s definitely something on your server not communicating properly.

    It’s either that or something is blocking the connection with WP.

    I once recall an issue I had where the IP or the host’s subnet were included in a blacklist. Although this is a very rare occurrence, unless there was some sort of unusual traffic, or something like that going on.

    Now, you checked with a curl to Google, why don’t you try doing a curl to Facebook, Twitter, or something like that?

    It could be that maaaaybe you can have something like this on your hosts file:

    127.0.0.1 www.ads-software.com

    so when you do a

    curl https://www.ads-software.com

    you’re actually doing a

    curl https://127.0.0.1

    so if the server host denies a secure connection, maybe you could get a connection refused through port 443… but this is probably trying way too hard ??

    I tried with this curl:

    curl -sIL -k --resolve 'www.ads-software.com:443:198.143.164.252' https://www.ads-software.com

    which resolves to WP’s IP and ignores the insecure content or certificate failures, so if it fails, it could be that it’s not a DNS issue nor a host file issue, since -K is to allow communication from a not-so-safe channel.

    Thread Starter butterflyman

    (@butterflyman)

    Thanks Laken,

    I’m passing your suggestions along to tech support.

    Rob

    Thread Starter butterflyman

    (@butterflyman)

    tokyobiyori,

    If its possible that our IP address is blacklisted by www.ads-software.com’s server, I’d like to eliminate that variable first, because if we are blacklisted, then none of these other tests will matter. Is there anyone in these forums who could address that question?

    Thanks,

    Rob

    Moderator Steven Stern (sterndata)

    (@sterndata)

    Volunteer Forum Moderator

    >> If its possible that our IP address is blacklisted by www.ads-software.com’s serve <<

    Nope. There are no blacklists. <insert image of James Spader here>

    Have your server folks installed the current version of openSSL?

    Thread Starter butterflyman

    (@butterflyman)

    To all of you helpful people: Our dedicated server ISP tech support is working on all the suggestions all of you have made, as I type this. Thanks for helping us get to the bottom of this.

    Now, here’s some new info:

    In dashboard, all of our WP sites on our server say our WP version and plugin versions are the latest versions, but this turns out not to be true. Example: Plugin Simple Custom CSS. Our version is 3.3, which dashboard says is the latest, but the current version is actually 4.0.1

    Rob

Viewing 5 replies - 16 through 20 (of 20 total)
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