Comments on: paypal ipn simulator

By: Brian Lowe

Brian Lowe — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:48:00 +0000

You’re being far too generous in not blaming PayPal 100%

It’s 100% their fault that I’ve wasted hours in their systems and the wider network trying to get round what is portrayed as a network or transport error, when it’s plainly nothing of the sort.

Nobody is better suited than PayPal to offer an IPN test tool, so we as developers go first to PayPal and take their test results as gospel.

By interpreting the test result PayPal has taken responsibility for it. The least they could do would be to show their interpretation and follow it with the HTTP response, or even just the header so we might understand a bit more. We might even be able to see the cause and feed back to PayPal to help them produce more helpful error messages.

By: Gabriel Vítor

Gabriel Vítor — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 18:42:24 +0000

Thanks a lot Sean, this post save my weekend. /

By: Brian Katzung

Brian Katzung — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 15:31:00 +0000

In addition to fixing my implementation-specific issues, the following items were key to getting my IPNs to work:

Use port 443. Use of other ports is not guaranteed to work/be supported. (Named virtual hosts on Apache using SNI does appear to work.)

Make sure your host name resolves via a DNS A record and not a CNAME record.

By: admin

admin — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 22:04:07 +0000

the simulator only reports back a generic error message… which adds confusion in the debugging process. to debug dns try pinging the url you’re using from the command line.

ping your.example-domain.com
#PING your.example-domain.com (209.131.36.159): 56 data bytes

you’ll get an ip address back so that you can confirm that your application is handling the request. check your log files (if you have access to them) most likely located in /var/log/*** from what i can remember you have to post data back to paypal in order for the simulator to work. therefore, i’m surprised that any old homepage would present a success message in the simulator.

i’d also be very surprised if godaddy blocked port 80 and or port 443 (ssl). certain functions (in php for example) may not be available in your programming language depending on your hosting partner. however, paypal integration is one of the more common usages for ecom.

By: Dss

Dss — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 21:14:17 +0000

I cannot confirm this behavior. I can enter my homepage into the IPN simulator and IPN Simulator shows SUCCESS. But for one of my clients, no matter what page of his site I goto, even a known working callback script page, Paypal show the “IPN delivery failed. Unable to connect to the specified URL. Please verify the URL and try again.” error. So I am not convinced the error means that the script didn’t callback. I am still thinking it is either dns or webhost port blocking.. like godaddy has.

By: riggy

riggy — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 09:21:26 +0000

One more thing. I posted info about IPN based on your post on my site, if you don’t mind (it’s in polish). If you do, please let me know. Thanks!

By: riggy

riggy — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 11:15:14 +0000

Thanks a lot! I had the same problems with IPN. Simulator said “your url is BAD” instead of saying “your url is GOOD but handling IPN protocol is BAD”. Right now notifications are coming and all is going quite well :-)

Thanks again!