OJS Cannot Connect to pkp.sfu.ca – Shared Hosting IP Blocked?

Software Support
1

Describe the issue or problem
We are unable to access the PKP server (pkp.sfu.ca) from our OJS installation hosted on a shared hosting provider (Hosting Ceria). This results in a cURL error 7 when trying to load the Plugin Gallery or check for version updates.

We expected our OJS system to connect normally to the PKP server for these remote operations.

Steps I took leading up to the issue

  1. Go to Dashboard > Settings > Journals

  2. The page failed to load (error 500)

  3. See the following error in the browser or error logs:

Fatal error: Uncaught GuzzleHttp\Exception\ConnectException: 
cURL error 7: Failed to connect to pkp.sfu.ca port 80 after 204 ms: Could not connect to server

Our hosting provider confirmed the issue is not on their end and suspect that the server’s IP has been blocked by pkp.sfu.ca.

What application are you using?
Any version of OJS 3.x

Additional information
Our hosting provider has tested and confirmed that even with the firewall disabled, the following IPs cannot reach pkp.sfu.ca:

  • 119.235.255.211

  • 119.235.250.56

We kindly request these IPs to be whitelisted so that our OJS installation can connect to the PKP plugin gallery and version services.

Please let us know if you require any further information or logs.

Thank you for your support!

2

I’m not sure what the exact URL of the plugin list is, but I suggest you check network connectivity.

Assuming you have access to a shell on the machine I suggest that you do:

cd /tmp/

curl “https://github.com/pkp/plugin-gallery/”
curl “https://docs.pkp.sfu.ca/”
curl “https://pkp.sfu.ca/”
curl “https://www.google.com/”

You should see HTML scrolling past in each case

If anything doesn’t work adding '-vvv’ after the curl will give you verbose log messages.

3

Hi @indakabarody

There was indeed a block to one of the mentioned IPs. It’s unblocked now.

It was due to a regex matching ".bak” part of your URL without the proper word boundary in it. Now it’s fixed and should not happen again.