17 sites suddenly disconnected, and cannot be reconnected despite connection test succeeding

Hi,

17 of my 34 sites are suddenly disconnected (yesterday everything was normal).

When I go to the site settings and press “Test Connection”, I see a success. I can also assign, test and save a Unique Security ID.

The sites are set up to use https:// (in the settings).

However, “Reconnect” will fail. I briefly see an error message at the top of the screen before MainWP reloads, saying “MainWP Child plugin not detected or could not be reached! Ensure the MainWP Child plugin is installed and activated on the child site, and there are no security rules blocking requests. If you continue experiencing this issue, check the” (this is where the message is cut off).



I’ve gone through some old forum posts but the error messages were different and/or the suggested fixes don’t apply to this situation. What are my next steps? Thank you :slight_smile:

WordPress Check Required Detected Status

FileSystem Method = direct direct Pass
MultiSite Disabled =true true Pass
WordPress Memory Limit >=64M 40M Warning
WordPress Version >=3.6 6.1.1 Pass

PHP Required Detected Status

cURL Extension Enabled =true true Pass
cURL SSL Version >=OpenSSL/1.1.0 OpenSSL/1.1.1p Pass
cURL Timeout >=300 seconds 60 Warning
cURL Version >=7.18.1 7.84.0 Pass
PCRE Backtracking Limit >=10000 1000000 Pass
PHP Allow URL fopen N/A YES
PHP Disabled Functions N/A No functions disabled.
PHP Exif Support N/A YES ( V7.4.)
PHP IPTC Support N/A YES
PHP Loaded Extensions N/A Core, OAuth, PDO, Phar, Reflection, SPL, SimpleXML, Zend OPcache, bcmath, bz2, calendar, clos_ssa, ctype, curl, date, dom, exif, fileinfo, filter, ftp, gd, gettext, gmp, hash, i360, iconv, imagick, imap, intl, ionCube Loader, json, libxml, litespeed, mbstring, mysqli, mysqlnd, openssl, pcntl, pcre, pdo_mysql, pdo_sqlite, posix, readline, session, shmop, soap, sockets, sqlite3, standard, tokenizer, xml, xmlreader, xmlrpc, xmlwriter, xsl, zip, zlib
PHP Max Execution Time >=30 seconds 30 Pass
PHP Max Input Time >=30 seconds 60 Pass
PHP Memory Limit >=128M 256M Pass
PHP Post Max Size >=2M 8M Pass
PHP Safe Mode Disabled =true true Pass
PHP Upload Max Filesize >=2M 2M Pass
PHP Version >=7.0 7.4.33 Pass
PHP XML Support N/A YES
SSL Extension Enabled =true true Pass
SSL Warnings = empty Pass

MySQL Required Detected Status

MySQL Client Encoding N/A utf8mb4
MySQL Mode N/A ERROR_FOR_DIVISION_BY_ZERO,NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION
MySQL Version >=5.0 10.3.37-MariaDB-cll-lve Pass

Server Configuration Detected Value

Accept Content text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,/;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9
Accept-Charset Content N/A
Architecture 64 bit
Gateway Interface
HTTPS ON
Memory Usage 5.58 MB
Operating System Linux
Request Time 1674853202
Server Protocol HTTP/1.1
Server self connect Not expected HTTP response body:
Server Software LiteSpeed
User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/109.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

MainWP Dashboard Settings Detected Value

Abandoned plugins/themes tolerance 365
Basic uptime monitoring enabled Yes
Cache control enabled No
MainWP Dashboard Version Latest: 4.3.1 | Detected: 4.3.1 Pass
MainWP legacy backups enabled No
Maximum number of pages to return
Maximum number of posts to return
Maximum simultaneous install and update requests
Maximum simultaneous requests 4
Maximum simultaneous requests per ip1
Maximum simultaneous sync requests
Minimum delay between requests 200
Minimum delay between requests to the same ip1000
Number of child sites 34
Optimize for shared hosting or big networksNo
Plugin advanced automatic updates enabledYes
Primary backup system MainWP Legacy Backups
REST API enabled No
Site health monitoring enabled Yes
Theme advanced automatic updates enabledYes
Use WP Cron No
WP Core advanced automatic updates enabledYes

Extensions Version License Status

Advanced Uptime Monitor Extension 5.2.2 Actived Pass
MainWP Domain Monitor Extension 4.0.1 Actived Pass
MainWP Sucuri Extension 4.0.13 Actived Pass
MainWP White Label Extension 4.1.3 Actived Pass
MainWP WooCommerce Shortcuts Extension4.1.1 Actived Pass
WPvivid Backup MainWP 0.9.28

Plugin Version Status

MainWP Dashboard 4.3.1 Active
WPvivid Backup MainWP 0.9.28 Active

Hey @marleen

Can you check if the MainWP Child plugin installed, active, and is up to date on these child sites?

And is there anything in common with the sites experiencing issues?

For example, do they have a plugin installed that might be causing a conflict, or perhaps they have the same security plugin installed?

Is Cloudflare being used for those sites or some other cloud proxy firewall?

Do they all have the same PHP version, which is different than the other sites?

Are they all using the same hosting provider?

Hi Bojan,

They all use Cloudflare DNS and use the same hosting provider, but so do 15 of the 17 sites that weren’t disconnected. They’re all also using the same basic plugin stack.

As of this morning, I could reconnect the sites (yesterday I was still getting error messages). I have no idea what changed, I made no changes on the sites. So the issue is resolved for now, it’s just kind of scary that it happened.

1 Like

@marleen one way I would troubleshoot these issues is if the MainWP Plugins haven’t been changed or updated in a while (this greatly removes the chance of it being a newly introduced bug) to look for changes in other places, such as new security on your host or a security rule suddenly blocking the request even a security plugin decided to block the connection.

If you use the test connection feature and it does not return a 200 response, the response it gives should give you a place to start looking.

1 Like

Hi Dennis,

“Test connection” returned 200 every time. The MainWP plugins were all up to date. And both the disconnected site and a good chunk of the sites that weren’t disconnected all live on the same shared server. It’s really weird!

They’re all connected now - so whatever it was, it was only a problem for 2 days.

@marleen I’m glad they are all working for you now.

Just as a quick followup: I missed your 200 response screenshot in your first post, and I checked that site’s IP, and it does not match what your Dashboard is showing you in that image, but it does appear to be a Cloudflare IP.

So we can try some other steps if it happens in the future:

  1. Set any site still not connecting to Passthrough (turn off the orange cloud) and see if it connects. If it does it would appear to be a Cloudflare security issue. If it doesn’t verify the site’s IP (using test connection), now to be sure your Dashboard is “seeing” the correct IP for your Dashboard.

  2. If it is a Cloudflare issue, set your Dashboard IP as a whitelisted IP so the security features do not block the Dashboard.

4 Likes

Awesome, thank you. Great to have a plan, just in case. :slight_smile:

1 Like

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