Paypal Orders Not Appearing in Admin

My clients site https://www.belcourtbeads.com has all of sudden stopped putting order info in the admin panel & stopped sending the client/admin order information. The paypal payment is being made sucessfully though.

I have not done any updates to this site in many months so no changes have been made to the zen cart files. The version I am running is 1.3.7.

I have tried the patch posted by Dr.Byte (http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=56216&page=2) but it is still not working. After searching the forum it looks like I am not the only person having this issue and there has yet to be a solution that actually works.

To add another note to this issue I tested other payment types like check/money order and when payment is not set to Paypal everything works as it should. So this is an issue with the connection between Zen Cart & Paypal ONLY.

I have now called Paypal and after they did a test they said the only error on their end was that after payment was made successfully was "nothing to be forwarded" which was in regards to the Instant Payment Notification. I have checked and the link to the IPN is the same on PayPal account as it is stated in the zen cart admin.

Link: http://belcourtbeads.com/ipn_main_handler.php

anyone?

I have done the curl test and get the following results.

Link: http://www.belcourtbeads.com/curltest.php

6 Couldn't resolve host 'www.zen-cart.com'

Array
(
    [url] => "http://www.zen-cart.com/testcurl.php"
    [http_code] => 0
    [header_size] => 0
    [request_size] => 0
    [filetime] => -1
    [ssl_verify_result] => 0
    [redirect_count] => 0
    [total_time] => 0
    [namelookup_time] => 0
    [connect_time] => 0
    [pretransfer_time] => 0
    [size_upload] => 0
    [size_download] => 0
    [speed_download] => 0
    [speed_upload] => 0
    [download_content_length] => 0
    [upload_content_length] => 0
    [starttransfer_time] => 0
    [redirect_time] => 0
)

6 Couldn't resolve host 'www.zen-cart.com'This message seems to indicate that your hosting company's server is having trouble doing DNS lookups to access external sites ... which is required to communicate back to PayPal to confirm the details of the transactions they send you.

If it "used to" work, but doesn't anymore, then your hosting company must have changed the server configurations somewhere.

DrByte:

This message seems to indicate that your hosting company's server is having trouble doing DNS lookups to access external sites ... which is required to communicate back to PayPal to confirm the details of the transactions they send you.

If it "used to" work, but doesn't anymore, then your hosting company must have changed the server configurations somewhere.

Good call, I will give them a ring tomorrow.

Note that the curltest.php script uses CURL to communicate, whereas the PayPal IPN processing script uses the PHP fsockopen() function. The latter can be tested with the ipncheck.php script.

Regardless, both methods rely on DNS lookups to work properly.

I see, when I try the ipncheck.php I get the following.

IPNCHECK.PHP - Version 1.0

IPN TESTING - POSTING to PayPal via: [B]ssl://www.paypal.com:443[/B]

IPN FATAL ERROR :: Could not establish fsockopen. 
Host Details = ssl://www.paypal.com:443 (0) php_network_getaddresses: getaddrinfo failed: hostname nor servname provided, or not known

 Trying again without SSL ...

IPN FATAL ERROR :: Could not establish fsockopen. 
Host Details = ssl://www.paypal.com:443 (0) php_network_getaddresses: getaddrinfo failed: hostname nor servname provided, or not known

Exactly. Your host needs to fix their DNS name resolution capability on the server.

The host stated that nothing has been changed to their servers since the last successful order a month ago. I just saw that someone else has opened a thread with the exact same issue as me could this be a fault with the Paypal IPN?

Sheehan:

The host stated that nothing has been changed to their servers since the last successful order a month ago.Well, whether they remember changing anything or not, it's their server that's not working right.

Sheehan:

I just saw that someone else has opened a thread with the exact same issue as me could this be a fault with the Paypal IPN?
If your server cannot look up the server address for PayPal, then the issue is not with the code or PayPal IPN capability. It's a server issue.

Host has run out of ideas to fix this issue, would you know what a possible fix could be?

Hmmm it looks like they have made php changes lately. Linked below is a phpinfo file of my server. Would someone with a working install do a comparison of php functions to see if something is not set properly OR better yet post your phpinfo so I can compare them.

Link: http://belcourtbeads.com/phpinfo.php

Some would say that "allow_url_include = on" is a dangerous setting if you're running PHP code that's not properly sanitized (the latest version of Zen Cart is safe from those risks, but that doesn't guarantee that any other scripts you've got on the site are safe).

Additionally, "register_globals=on" is also considered poor practice from a security standpoint.

While your hosting company may feel defensive about this comment ... "safe_mode=on" is indicative of a hosting company who is paranoid of security matters and just turns on a catch-all option which cripples all kinds of functionality, rather than taking the time to carefully fine-tune and secure the server.

As well, some would say that the fact that they've added suhosin suggests the same paranoia. Suhosin shouldn't harm PayPal communications, but it will certainly prevent you from being able to use the whos-online viewer in the admin area to see customer shopping activity in real time.

OpenSSL 0.9.7i 14 Oct 2005 is a little newer than what your server is apparently using: OpenSSL 0.9.7e-p1 25 Oct 2004

Granted, the above items should have no impact on PayPal transactions, unless of course Safe Mode is configured with poorly-chosen restrictions.

And further, none of the above issues is related to name resolution on the server.

Frankly, if your hosting company can't figure out how to get name resolution working properly on their server, you should be taking your business someplace where they know what they're doing.

DrByte:

Frankly, if your hosting company can't figure out how to get name resolution working properly on their server, you should be taking your business someplace where they know what they're doing.

The host has found out that is an issue with their version of Apache. They looked through all of the Zen Cart files and found no errors(obviously). My host managed to successfully get proper connections via terminal so they are re-installing and re-setting up Apache on the server.

Hopefully it works, thanks for your help.

They may also need to verify that they've got good choices in their server's resolv.conf file.

My host could not figure out the issue so they moved the site to one of their newer servers and it immediately worked properly again.

Thanks for confirming that it was indeed a hosting problem.