Socket Error - Connection to Remote Host timed out

[davidting]

Hi,

I encountered occasionally the above message while accessing websites. What could be the problem?

For example, when I access my blog with many photos, the texts were shown but not the photos. When I click on the broken links, I got Socket Error.

I installed WinGate Standard 6.6.1 on Windows XP SP3 machine, with 3GB of RAM. Computers on internal network is accessing the internet website through transparent proxy.

David

[logan]

What is the socket error? Is it a 10049 socket error?

[saubrey]

I too am now getting socket errors. I'm trying to access http://www.adobe.com and within few seconds, my browser and Gatekeeper shows socket error Connection to remote host timed out. The socket error occurs much too fast to be a valid time out.

I'm running Wingate 6.6.0 build 1277 on a win2k sp4 computer.

I've tried many things to try to work around this problem but so far no luck. I've tried configuring my browser (firefox and IE) with no proxy (therefore using WG's transparent proxy), I've tried configuring a proxy in Firefox and IE, I've tried turning off WG's firewall, I've tried turning off KAV's scanning in the www proxy. But nothing works.

I suppose that http://www.adobe.com is at fault, but then again I'm also having trouble logging into facebook and iTunes. Not all the time for those two sites, but over 50% of the time.

[adrien]

check the system event log on the client computer.

if you're running XP SP2 or later, it has a limit of 10 half-open connections before the OS starts choking connections.\

if you see event 4226, this is happening.

[breese]

As a temp fix (until i build a new W2k3 server)
I downloaded and used Half-open_limit_fix_3.6

[saubrey]

I'm running Win2k sp4 Advanced Server.

[adrien]

Hi Steve

So this is a recent thing? Were there any recent windows updates?

It is sometimes possible to get a quick timeout (quicker than you'd expect). most of the retry settings for TCP are configurable in the registry, so you can set things like the number of times to try connecting etc. If these settings got changed by something, then a connection could time out more quickly.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/120642

TcpMaxConnectRetransmissions is the value that sets the number of attempts.

This is a WinGate WWW proxy error page reporting the timeout hey? Not the browser?

Regards

Adrien

[saubrey]

No recent programs added to the Win2k Server, but probably Windows critical updates were installed a few weeks ago.

After further observation I seem to have two unrelated issues, but they started happening at the same time so I thought they were the same.

Issue 1 mostly seems to be only with sites that use HTTPS. Not all such sites, only some of them like facebook, and iTunes and sometimes logging into AOL email (there could be more, these are all that I remember.). When the browser (IE or firefox) is not configured with a proxy (and WG does have a www proxy with transparent ENS), then the browser is sometimes (not always) not able to log into facebook, iTunes, and AOL – they get a time out after 60 or 90 seconds. But when Firefox and IE are configured to use a proxy, then they always successfully connect with facebook, iTunes, & AOL. For now I’ve configured all browsers to use a proxy and have not had a problem in the last day or so.

Issue 2 is with Adobe sites. What doesn’t fit with what I mentioned above is http://www.adobe.com, and http://get.adobe.com/reader/. They don’t use HTTPS and yet all three computers in my house (xp, vista, & win2k – firefox and IE) sometimes get immediate (i.e. 1 second) socket error timeouts and if they don’t get immediate socket error timeouts, then a partial web page is displayed with many images missing – the parts of the page that do display take 30 or 60 seconds to display and after that time the browser shows that the page is “done”, but with errors.

In the last few days, only the two adobe sites get the immediate socket error timeouts or display a partial page. I haven’t seen this with any other site. When an Adobe site fails to load, if I then view some other random site, it loads correctly, if I then attempt to view Adobe again, it fails. So the issue is not that I’m having random issues with my ISP or wireless connection.

[adrien]

Hi Steve

would you be able to confirm if this problem still presents on 6.6.2?

http://www.wingate.com/downloads/WinGat ... 84-USE.EXE

I'm wondering if there's some possibility caching might be coming into play here.

Regards

Adrien

[saubrey]

I also thought that www caching would be a problem so I turned off caching in WG and purged all browser caches, but still that didn't help. I'll try WG 6.6.2 next.

I'm now thinking that DNS could be a problem. If 6.6.2 doesn't fix it, I'll try purging all the DNS caches.

-- Steve

[labull]

Just saw possibly the same behavoir using 1284 with caching turned off.

While client at an https site (in Outlook Web Access) got the socket error - connection timed out message.

Any attempts to refresh the site got the same error. Attempt to access other sites from different tabs in IE on the same computer were successful.

Went to the site on the WinGate server and successfully loaded the page. Was then able to refresh the page on the client.

I suppose I should install wireshark in case I see it again.

Vista 64 - IE8 - Direct Proxy - WinGate 6.2.2 (Build 1284)

Don't know if it matters but I have PureSight 3.0 installed and checked for WWW Proxy but the trial license has expired.

[rboynton]

Went to the site on the WinGate server and successfully loaded the page. Was then able to refresh the page on the client.

Hi Larry,

Sounds suspiciously like the sporadic problem I am having (viewtopic.php?f=12&t=39781). When it happened again, I could ping the WG server just fine. Did not remember to do an nslookup for a domain, but likely it has something to do with it. We are not using any other plugins.

[saubrey]

I installed WG 6.6.2. It seems to have fixed all my problems with HTTPS. Now all HTTPS sites that were previously not accessibble with 6.6.0 are now accessible with and without a proxy configured in my browsers.

My problem with www.adobe.com still occurs.

[adrien]

a packet capture would be great if possible.

We even built packet capturing into WinGate 6.6.2 (not yet released) to make sure we can always get a capture if required.