[Resolved] cURL error 28:Connection time out after X milliseconds

[Aditya Bhosale]

Dear GP team,
I have purchased the GP premium plugin one year subscription on 24/05/21. I am getting cURL error 28 while trying to activate the license key for the premium plugin. I contacted my hosting provider Dreamhost explaining them the problem and after making several tests this is what they told me to convey GP team:
“Your IP has been cleared of any blocks our firewall application system that could be blocking the use of the license. We also verified any band in your IP and there are none whatsoever. We also checked your WordPress installation and it’s working perfect, and that for the tie you reached to us, after we tried to input 3 or 4 times the license, there is no record of an error in our system. I strongly suggest you try with support again from the plugin, and tell them we already verified from our end that there are no blocks on the plugin and there’s no other reason for the premium to not activate.”

I am new to WordPress and don’t have any idea about PHP or coding. I hope this issue would be finally resolved.

[Tom]

Hi there,

We have seen this with some Dreamhost servers, unfortunately.

We’ve confirmed that the two IPs you sent via email aren’t directly blocked by our hosting.

Perhaps Dreamhost can provide a traceroute of the cURL request to generatepress.com? That may help us narrow down the issue.

[Aditya Bhosale]

Hello Tom,
Thank you for your quick response. I contacted my hosting provider Dreamhost again and they seem to have found where the issue lies.
Here is the complete transcript of what they have said:

Hello Aditya,

Thank you for reaching out to DreamHost support. I will be more than
happy to help you with your request.

I would like to inform you that we have tried running a cURL trace to the
host generatepress.com and unable to reach it successfully. we tried
running a traceroute and can confirm it’s leaving our network but looks
to be getting stuck on this hop:

dh_vv8wzi@culver:~/gohitchhiking.com$ traceroute generatepress.com
traceroute to generatepress.com (35.193.232.176), 30 hops max, 60 byte
packets
1 ip-69-163-216-1.dreamhost.com (69.163.216.1) 1.424 ms 1.381 ms
1.343 ms
2 pdx1-cr-1.sd.dreamhost.com (66.33.200.2) 0.701 ms 0.684 ms 0.653
ms
3 pdx1-bdr-1.sd.dreamhost.com (66.33.200.0) 0.625 ms 0.596 ms 0.568
ms
4 google-b.nwax.net (198.32.195.33) 4.203 ms 4.111 ms 4.103 ms
5 74.125.243.177 (74.125.243.177) 5.662 ms 209.85.254.248
(209.85.254.248) 4.614 ms 74.125.243.177 (74.125.243.177) 5.667 ms
6 74.125.243.195 (74.125.243.195) 4.116 ms 108.170.245.124
(108.170.245.124) 4.006 ms 74.125.243.178 (74.125.243.178) 4.707 ms
7 216.239.50.20 (216.239.50.20) 11.118 ms 11.101 ms *
8 * 216.239.50.120 (216.239.50.120) 48.656 ms 47.782 ms
9 142.250.235.163 (142.250.235.163) 173.909 ms 172.253.75.252
(172.253.75.252) 43.223 ms 216.239.43.17 (216.239.43.17) 44.473 ms
10 142.250.232.18 (142.250.232.18) 42.272 ms 216.239.48.165
(216.239.48.165) 43.382 ms 142.250.56.55 (142.250.56.55) 42.747 ms
11 142.250.232.51 (142.250.232.51) 43.565 ms * 72.14.235.13
(72.14.235.13) 42.552 ms

It seems to be getting stuck on the IP 142.250.232.51 which after looking
it seems to be a Google IP as described below:

NetRange: 142.250.0.0 – 142.251.255.255
CIDR: 142.250.0.0/15
NetName: GOOGLE
NetHandle: NET-142-250-0-0-1
Parent: NET142 (NET-142-0-0-0-0)
NetType: Direct Allocation
OriginAS: AS15169
Organization: Google LLC (GOGL)

Below you can find the output of it:

root@culver:~# curl -v -X TRACE https://generatepress.com/
* Trying 35.193.232.176…
* TCP_NODELAY set
* connect to 35.193.232.176 port 443 failed: Connection timed out
* Failed to connect to generatepress.com port 443: Connection timed out
* Closing connection 0
curl: (7) Failed to connect to generatepress.com port 443: Connection
timed out

As you can verify from the trace it is leaving our server properly which
will indicate that there is no IP being blocked, with this info you may
reach back to the plugin developer for further guidance.

I hope this helps to finally resolve this issue. Looking forward towards your response and Thank you in advance.
Regards,
Aditya B

[Tom]

Hi there,

Thanks for this. Spent time talking with our hosting yesterday and today, but no solution as of yet, unfortunately. It seems possible that one of the Google Cloud servers that our hosting is using is bouncing the request back from Dreamhost specifically, but it’s not something they’re able to fix.

There is one possible solution, but it involves some infrastructure changes on our end that will result in some downtime, so we need to plan a time to execute it. We may be able to get it done this weekend, but if not it may be a week or so until we’re able to try the new structure.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

[Tom]

We actually went ahead and made these changes today. Any chance you can give it another shot now?

[Aditya Bhosale]

Hello Tom,
Thank you for your response. I tried activating the plugin again but this time I get ‘There has been a critical error on this website’ page.Here is the link to screenshot of the error link. I tried activating the license by deactivating all the other plugins but it still doesn’t work. I hope you could help me with this. Looking forward towards your reply.
Regards,
Aditya B

[Stacey Usborne]

Hi there,

Can you ask Dreamhost to run another trace route to see if anything has changed?

Thanks!

[Aditya Bhosale]

Hello Stacey,
I reached back to my hosting provider with this critical error problem and they have ran another trace route and reviewed error logs upon which this is what they have to say:

Hello!

Thanks for writing back and providing an update!

Sorry to read the ongoing trouble with setting up your GeneratePress
plugin.

Thanks again for sharing the details. I reviewed the error.log and found
this entry:

[Sun May 30 10:18:10.479903 2021] [fcgid:warn] [pid 28821:tid
4097523664640] [client 103.88.87.126:62972] mod_fcgid: stderr: PHP Fatal
error: Uncaught Error: Call to a member function get_error_message() on
array in
/home/dh_vv8wzi/gohitchhiking.com/wp-content/plugins/gp-premium/inc/activation.php:499,
referer:
https://www.gohitchhiking.com/wp-admin/themes.php?page=generate-options

It looks like there is a php fatal error “Uncaught Error: Call to a
member function get_error_message()”. I found this thread with a user
reporting a similar error:

https://generatepress.com/forums/topic/uncaught-error-messeage-after-saving-the-gp-premium-license-code/

I ran another cURL from your web server and it appears the host
‘generatepress.com’ is now responding but returning a 403 error:

@culver:~/gohitchhiking.com$ curl -I https://generatepress.com/
HTTP/2 403
date: Mon, 31 May 2021 00:18:29 GMT
content-type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
content-length: 16
x-frame-options: SAMEORIGIN
cache-control: private, max-age=0, no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate,
post-check=0, pre-check=0
expires: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:01 GMT
cf-request-id: 0a61625fa50000fdc12234f000000001
expect-ct: max-age=604800,
report-uri=”https://report-uri.cloudflare.com/cdn-cgi/beacon/expect-ct”
server: cloudflare
cf-ray: 657c06790adafdc1-PDX
alt-svc: h3-27=”:443″; ma=86400, h3-28=”:443″; ma=86400, h3-29=”:443″;
ma=86400

Very strange. I tested curl outside of your web server and I get a
200-okay response:

curl -I https://generatepress.com/
HTTP/2 200
date: Mon, 31 May 2021 00:19:43 GMT
content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
cf-ray: 657c08414fef04ff-LAX
cache-control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate
expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
link: <https://generatepress.com/&gt;; rel=shortlink
vary: Accept-Encoding
cf-cache-status: DYNAMIC
cf-request-id: 0a61637ccb000004ff6f209000000001
expect-ct: max-age=604800,
report-uri=”https://report-uri.cloudflare.com/cdn-cgi/beacon/expect-ct&#8221;

Possibly GeneratePress may have a blocked access from your domain’s IP
address? If it’s no trouble would it be possible to inquire with
GeneratePress support if they can review why a 403 error occurs when
trying to curl ‘https://generatepress.com&#8217; from your web server/host’
gohitchhiking.com or culver.dreamhost.com or your domain’s IP
‘69.163.220.175’? The host ‘generatepress.com’ can be reached from your
web server by running a ping test but the curl test returns a
403-forbidden response.

I hope this info helps you to further rectify the problem from your side. Looking forward towards your reply.
Regards,
Aditya B

[Tom]

Hi there,

I just talked with our hosting again and they confirmed that 69.163.220.175 is not blocked by our server.

I also checked our access logs for anything from 69.163.220.175 and nothing came up at all, which means the request isn’t even making it to our server at all.

Perhaps they can see if their firewall is preventing the outgoing connection?

[Aditya Bhosale]

Hello Tom,
Thank you for your timely responses in identifying and providing updates on this issue. I reached back to my hosting provider(Dreamhost) with your update and they have finally moved me to another web server that is able to curl generatepress.com. The license has been finally activated now and I am receiving updates. I hope Dreamhost could have made it clear way before that some plugins have issues activating on some of their servers. Anyway thanks for your awesome support and have a great day.
Cheers!

Aditya B

[Tom]

Great news! Did they specify which plugins were having issues, just in case other Dreamhost customers have the same issue?

Thanks! 🙂

[Author]

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