Need to see if your shared folder is taking up space on your dropbox 👨‍💻? Find out how to check here.

Forum Discussion

joe_walker's avatar
joe_walker
Helpful | Level 5
7 years ago
Solved

Connection timeouts

Hi, From approximately 22:30 UTC on 27 Oct until present we have been getting timeouts when trying to connect to the Dropbox API: cURL error 7: Failed to connect to content.dropboxapi.com port 44...
API
  • joe_walker's avatar
    joe_walker
    7 years ago

    I have just received a reply from Digital Pacific explaining that:

    "We erroneously blocked the IP due to suspicion of it being involved in a large attack on our networks, This error has now been corrected and the block reverted"

    So this problem was with the host - my apologies for wasting your time. Thanks very much for your help.

joe_walker's avatar
joe_walker
Helpful | Level 5
7 years ago

We are the only users of the app.

Specifically the call to the "files/get_metadata" times out, however all attempts to connect to content.dropboxapi.com time out.

I do not know of anything on the network which would be interfering with the connection, and do not know of anything that changed around the time the problem started occurring. The server's host (Digital Pacific) has not reported that they are aware of any network issues, though I have submitted a ticket to double check.

As the app is running on a server without a web browser, is there any other way to get the debug information provided by dropbox-debug.com?

Greg-DB's avatar
Greg-DB
Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
7 years ago

Calls to files/get_metadata would be made to api.dropboxapi.com (not content.dropboxapi.com). There are other endpoints on api.dropboxapi.com as well though, such as files/list_folder. Are you attempting any other calls to api.dropboxapi.com, and if so, are those not failing?

Please do let me know if you hear anything from Digital Pacific.

And no, the debug page uses JavaScript to run the tests, so you'd need to use a browser (e.g., you can't just curl the page), so unless you can use your server as a proxy, or something to that effect, we'll need to investigate without that information.

  • joe_walker's avatar
    joe_walker
    Helpful | Level 5
    7 years ago

    Thanks Greg. Sorry, I was mistaken about the specific call it's timing out on.

    Here's an example of a curl command failing on a content.dropboxapi.com endpoint:

    $ curl -X POST https://content.dropboxapi.com/2/files/upload --header "Authorization: Bearer <token>" --header "Dropbox-API-Arg: {\"path\": \"/test.txt\",\"mode\": \"add\",\"autorename\": true,\"mute\": false,\"strict_conflict\": false}" --header "Content-Type: application/octet-stream" --data-binary @test
    curl: (7) Failed to connect to 2620:100:6033:8::a27d:5308: Network is unreachable

    Interestingly, the error message here points to an IPV6 address. From that server, `ping6 ipv6.google.com` outputs `Connect: Network is unreachable`, so I wonder if the issue is that IPV6 is not enabled on that server.

    Should we need IPV6 enabled to properly use the API?

    • Greg-DB's avatar
      Greg-DB
      Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
      7 years ago

      I see, thanks.

      It looks like that's a different error message now though. For reference, can you let me know exactly which endpoint(s) and host(s) are currently returning which error message(s) for you? 

      And no, IPv6 isn't required. Both v4 and v6 should work. I just tried it myself and confirmed that https://content.dropboxapi.com/2/files/upload is usable via both.

       

      • joe_walker's avatar
        joe_walker
        Helpful | Level 5
        7 years ago

        I believe that the difference in the error message is due to the message in my initial report coming from libcurl being used by a PHP application as opposed to command line curl.

        Calls to both files/list_folder and file_requests/get returned the expected result. Therefore it seems api.dropboxapi.com is working fine for me.

        Attempting to use the /files/upload endpoint returns the error mentioned previously:

        $ curl -X POST https://content.dropboxapi.com/2/files/upload     --header "Authorization: Bearer <token>"     --header "Dropbox-API-Arg: {\"path\": \"/test.txt\",\"mode\": \"add\",\"autorename\": true,\"mute\": false,\"strict_conflict\": false}"     --header "Content-Type: application/octet-stream"     --data-binary @test
curl: (7) Failed to connect to 2620:100:6033:8::a27d:5308: Network is unreachable

        As does a call to /files/download:

        $ curl -X POST https://content.dropboxapi.com/2/files/download     --header "Authorization: Bearer <token>"     --header "Dropbox-API-Arg: {\"path\": \"/test.txt\"}"
        curl: (7) Failed to connect to 2620:100:6033:8::a27d:5308: Network is unreachable

        So it seems that the problem is related to API calls on content.dropboxapi.com.

About Dropbox API Support & Feedback

Node avatar for Dropbox API Support & Feedback
Find help with the Dropbox API from other developers.

The Dropbox Community team is active from Monday to Friday. We try to respond to you as soon as we can, usually within 2 hours.

If you need more help you can view your support options (expected response time for an email or ticket is 24 hours), or contact us on X, Facebook or Instagram.

For more info on available support options for your Dropbox plan, see this article.

If you found the answer to your question in this Community thread, please 'like' the post to say thanks and to let us know it was useful!