403 Forbidden. Your server is not able to communicate with generatepress.com

I get this error when I try to update the license key: “403 Forbidden. Your server is not able to communicate with generatepress.com in order to activate your license key.”

Hi there,

Are all of the sites using the same IP address? If so, it would be strange that only one is being blocked.

Can you share the IP of the server so we can see if it's blocked on our end?

Thanks!

PING nancygoldstone.com (184.105.129.51)
It's the only site I maintain which is hosted on its particular server (oscar.he.net).
PING oscar.he.net (184.105.129.2)

Hi there,

Our hosting (Kinsta) has confirmed that neither IPs are blocked on our network. We also checked our Cloudflare account and they're not blocked there.

In fact, we're never seeing those IPs reaching our server at all. Are we sure the request is being allowed through your server?

I sent that response to HE support and they responded: "If that is the case, then you may want to contact GeneratePress to assist with debugging their software."
This was what I was afraid of -- both sides say "It's the other guy's fault"! Not sure where to go from here, but I SHOULD be able to license the software on my client's website.

Not what you want to hear as a customer - definitely understand that.

The software itself is working as it should (as you've experienced on other servers).

Can they provide a traceroute to generatepress.com using cURL? It may provide more insight that we can take to our hosting. It's a difficult one for us to debug as the IPs are either banned by our server or they're not. When our hosting says they're not there really isn't much more we can press them about, unfortunately.

Here is their response:

The commands can be run by connecting to the server with SSH. If you want to share the admin/sftp/shell password I can log in and run the commands.

Should the tests be to generatepress.com or http://www.generatepress.com because they have different IP addresses. And http://www.generatepress.com supports IPv6 while generatepress.com only supports IPv4.

For traceroute I'd run the following tests:

traceroute generatepress.com

traceroute http://www.generatepress.com

traceroute6 http://www.generatepress.com

For cURL I'd run the following tests:

curl -vvv https://generatepress.com/

And did they check if the IPv6 addresses are blocked or reaching their server? Requests would come from any of the following IP addresses.

oscar.he.net
ipv4: 184.105.129.2
ipv6: 2001:470:0:19c::2

nancygoldstone.com
ipv4: 184.105.129.51
ipv6: 2001:470:0:19c::b869:8133

We've checked all of those IPs and none are banned on our end.

Could you check if our external IP is banned with your hosting?: 35.232.64.197

We have our hosting system admins looking further into it to see if they can uncover anything, but all of the IPs you've listed in this topic are clear to communicate with our server. Hopefully they dig something up.

Great news -- I was finally able to activate the license key!!! This is the response I received from the ISP:
"The '403 Forbidden' HTTP error message was misleading as it was actually a PHP error and the HTTP request was never made. It should work now."
Thanks for your help in troubleshooting this pesky issue.

That's great news. Any chance they can share what the PHP error was?

Thanks!

PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function curl_init()

This was in reference to a PHP module that was not installed by default. We've installed it, so you shouldn't have this particular issue come up again on this server--unless we perform an OS upgrade that replaces the PHP version, and we always send out notices in advance of performing OS upgrades.

Aha, that makes sense. Thanks for letting us know! :)