perpetual “scan stage failed” plus cURL error 7

Same problem for months now, tried all the above more than once. Different hosts, different themes, different plugins. About to ditch Wordfence for all time as that notice is making all the clients panic.

Surely Wordfence can fix this based on the thousands of others reporting the same problem around the web?

Hi @xuzi, thanks for reaching out!

Ultimately cURL Error 7 is happening at the site and suggests that it can’t connect to our servers at all. That’s not something we can necessarily “fix” as we can’t see sites experiencing the problem if they can’t connect, and can’t automatically change configuration in the case of another firewall or security software intervening. However, we can try to see manually if something like Cloudflare, Litespeed, or a load balancer/firewall needs to be configured to allow (or not abort) those connections.

If you have access to the shell on your server, sometimes running curl -v https://noc1.wordfence.com/ and sending us the output can help too. It’s not a perfect check as it bypasses PHP but in many cases can point to the precise cause of the cURL error.

I appreciate you letting us know the many steps you’ve tried so far, so it’s probably best to take a look at your diagnostic to see if anything stands out. You can send one to wftest @ wordfence . com directly from the link at the top of the Wordfence > Tools > Diagnostics page. Then click on “Send Report by Email”. Please add your forum username where indicated and respond here after you have sent it.

NOTE: It should look as follows – Screenshot of Tools > Diagnostic > Send by Email

Thanks,
Peter.

Hi @xuzi, I just noticed (when looking for a diagnostic after my reply) you’d actually sent a diagnostic originally on 17th although it wasn’t mentioned in your post, sorry for not spotting this.

I noticed your cURL Error 7 was on the non-critical IPv6 connectivity section of your diagnostic at that time, so the connectivity in/out using IPv4 returns “OK”. Your IP detection also seems good, so your user IP isn’t matching your server or anything strange like that.

As you’ve already tried using IPv4 only, can I also clarify that you’ve checked “Start all scans remotely”? It appears on the troubleshooting page you mentioned trying, so I assume you did but wanted to check.

Your auto_prepend_file appears in .htaccess and .user.ini, which may not be necessary on CGI/FastCGI (it’s often only in php.ini or .user.ini), but it doesn’t appear to be an issue as your firewall is showing correctly as optimized.

I do see your max_execution_time is 120 but should be 60 (or lower) in php.ini as we have seen timeout issues in the past with numbers higher than that.

Failing any of the above, the last 20 lines of the scan log would be helpful to us to determine what is happening immediately before a manual scan failure in your case:

• Stop any existing scan if it is still running (The “Start New Scan” button turns into a “Stop” button while the scan is running).
• Go to the Tools > Diagnostics page.
• In the “Debugging Options” section, if “Start scan remotely” is checked, now uncheck this option.
• Check the circle “Enable debugging mode“
• Click to “Save Changes”.
• Start a new scan on the Scan page.
• If the scan fails again, copy the last 20 lines or so from the Log (click the “Show Log” link) once the scan finishes and paste them in your next reply.

Thanks again,
Peter.