"No route to hostNo route to host" problem

jkimball · Post by **jkimball** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 10:03 pm

Whenever I try to install anything via Sparticus I get the message:

"Trying to open URL lang_de.inc.php?rev=1.9999...
No route to hostNo route to host"

It happens with all plugins, and I have set my plugin directory to 777. Please help.

Post by **garvinhicking** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 10:23 pm

Hi!

If you get this message your web provider is blocking outgoing requests from your webserver via HTTP/Port 80. Please talk to your provider to comment on this.

If he doesn'T deactivate the firewall, you sadly can't use the spartacus plugin and need to download plugins manually from http://spartacus.s9y.org/

Regards,
Garvin

jkimball · Post by **jkimball** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 10:27 pm

Gavin, thank you for your quick reply. I appreciate all the help that you give to people like me who honestly don't know what they are doing.

Post by **garvinhicking** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 10:49 pm

Hi!

You're very welcome. I wish I could have told you an easy fix, but sadly the problem can only be changed by your provider...

Best regards,
Garvin

Martin Avis · Post by **Martin Avis** » Wed Jun 07, 2006 11:30 am

Now here's an odd thing.

I've downloaded loads of plug-ins for my blog and never had a problem.

But yesterday I started getting the same failure message that jkimball has reported.

I have emailed my host's support desk but they say that nothing has been changed at their end.

Weird.

Martin.

Post by **garvinhicking** » Wed Jun 07, 2006 12:46 pm

Hi!

You might want to read the blog.s9y.org article about Spartacus issues. Changing your file mirror from SF.Net to Netmirror.org might solve things...

Also, there's always the slight chance that the noted hosts are down or not reachable... :-/

Regards,
Garvin

judebert · Post by **judebert** » Wed Jun 07, 2006 7:58 pm

Okay, this is getting asked often enough that it deserves a check in software and an error message of its own. Garvin, here's my gameplan:

1) Set up a single php script on spartacus.s9y.org (plain port 80) that checks the SourceForge and NetMirror sites whenever it's called, and returns their status.

2) Add code to SPARTACUS so if it can't connect, it checks the spartacus site to see if the selected mirror is up, alerting the user if not. If the mirror is up, but the user can't connect, warn the user that his server is firewalled.

3) Add more code to SPARTACUS so if it can't connect to the spartacus site, it tries to connect to Google port 80. If that won't happen, alert the user that his server is firewalled.

When that's done, any user who can't use SPARTACUS will know why, and how to correct the problem. Sound good?

Post by **garvinhicking** » Wed Jun 07, 2006 8:05 pm

Hi!

A status check on spartacus.s9y.org might not really help, because both SF.Net and Netmirror.org both have seldomly ongoing connection problems. Usually it's just simple network issues that might not even report errors because the route for other ISPs still works.

And the status check would need some caching because it would really slow things down if done on each page request. Then again, it would be somewhat uselly, if the downtime is 1 minute, and people then wonder.

What would thus be more interesting is your Point #2. But this requires hacking the PEAR HTTP/Net/Socket modules. I must admit that my knowledge to them is quite limited and I can'T really get the hang to it. Plus, detecting network problems using PHP is often a pain.....

judebert · Post by **judebert** » Wed Jun 07, 2006 8:37 pm

I was figuring that in step 1, spartacus.s9y.org would attempt to download the module list. We know that s9y.org isn't firewalled, so if it can get the list, others should be able to, as well. We could limit it to checking no more often than every 30 minutes or something, to keep bandwidth reasonable.

Step 2 could be done with just fsockopen() instead of PEAR. We already know we couldn't get the file ourselves; so we use a socket we can control to see whether a known-working site can get the file. And that enables Step 3, where we know we can't connect even to a simple web server.

I'd be willing to write the SPARTACUS code, if you think spartacus.s9y.org can handle downloading the module list on a regular basis.

Post by **garvinhicking** » Thu Jun 08, 2006 9:37 am

Hi!

Spartacus.s9y.org runs on SF.Net, and they are firewalled, I just noticed.

However, as I mentioned, these 30 minutes might then just hit a timespan where it works. Sometimes it doesn't work for just 5 minutes or so.

Step2: PEAR actually uses fsockopen. Sadly, debugging this is very hard since it's hard to emulate a "down host" or a failing network route, because at least I can't set up an environment with such terms...?

Best regards,
Garvin

judebert · Post by **judebert** » Thu Jun 08, 2006 3:04 pm

Firewalled? Oh, lord, you're kidding.

At least that's fixable by using a different server. I can even donate mine, for the time being (not like my site is generating lots of traffic or anything). Going down for five minutes at a time is the toughie. Either we'd need a low-bandwidth method for deciding whether the host is up (like retrieving a file listing or tiny file) so we can check every time, or we'd just need to say "It was up 30 minutes ago."

I intend to emulate a 'down host' during testing by setting the URL to something invalid.

Since I've got control of my own site, I'll do some work on this independently and post again when I've got concrete results. Meanwhile, is there another, smaller file I can use, to reduce bandwidth consumption?

Post by **garvinhicking** » Thu Jun 08, 2006 8:21 pm

Hi Judebert!

Hm, using a different server sounds dangerous to me. For SourceForge I have the access I need plus some guarantee that they don't go down ablaze without having someone to talk to. So I'd really like to keep "server dependencies" as low as possible. Even having Jannis as the dependency for s9y.org is at times really frustrating.

I intend to emulate a 'down host' during testing by setting the URL to something invalid.

That doesn'T work for me, because it's different if a host doesn't resolve to an IP, or if the network route to that IP is down/blocked/timouted. I couldn't ever reproduce problems you experience when a server is taking connections but then stalls.

I guess you'd need an own IP address with a webserver that you can make "stall". And for emulating TCP/IP problems...I don'T know

I'd be curious about what you could get done with this. I do think we definitely need this

is there another, smaller file I can use, to reduce bandwidth consumption?

You could use these:

http://spartacus.s9y.org/last.txt
http://netmirror.org/serendipity/last.txt
http://php-blog.cvs.sourceforge.net/*ch ... .cvsignore

These are pretty small, I hope

Regards,
Garvin

judebert · Post by **judebert** » Thu Jun 08, 2006 9:51 pm

Kay-o. I've actually got a private server, where I can take down the webserver at will; that's what I intend to use for testing. (That sounds so grandiose! Actually, it's my own Linux gateway with a dynamic but routeable IP address, easily accessible through a dynamic DNS address.) Sorry about the confusion over "invalid". Although an invalid DNS entry would be a good idea to test, too, come to think of it.

I understand about the extra server. If the SF.net site can't check availability, can one of the other s9y sites do it? More work for Jannis?

Of course, nothing extra until I get the basics worked out.

Woo-hoo! I've got another project!

Post by **garvinhicking** » Fri Jun 09, 2006 11:00 am

Hi!

Well, I think Jannis could put something online at www.s9y.org if we kindly ask him

)

Best regards,
Garvin

"No route to hostNo route to host" problem

"No route to hostNo route to host" problem

Re: "No route to hostNo route to host" problem