Hello, Great software, just a simple question. This is our first website, and the first using CCBILL as payment processor. Actually the first payment processor for that matter. Anyway we have configured CCBill to do ipn.php notication on approval and have setup test accounts to test. Everything seems to work but the ipn.php that I see in debug log in AMEMBER seems to lag anywhere from 3-15 minutes from the time CCBILL sends email notification to user of approval. I would have expected it to be received almost immediately after they sent approval email. CCBILL then displays an approved html page with hyperlink to memership area on our site. When you click this you get error no subscription or something to that effect. If you wait a while before clicking no error. Since this is our first time doing payment processing I want to know from others using CCBILL is a 3-15 minute lag before ipn.php is sent to amember software on our server normal. I assume that once this notification is received and processed the payment status is changed from pending to completed. I just want to know what my expectation level should be about how long ipn.php will be sent after CCBILL has approved transaction. Is the debug log that spits out the information the time that my site receives the ipn.php request or is something on my web host holding onto the request before forwarding the request onto amember script? We are hosted on lunarpages. Does CCBILL log when they send out ipn.php so that I can look at some log file on the CCBILL side of the transaction? If this delay is normal what do others do so users don't get antsy or pissed off by clicking members link or trying to login and getting denied even though CCBILL said they were approved. Thanks for any help you can provide, again I couldn't be happier with amember software so far. Jimmy
I'm using the aMember/CCBill combo and am not experiencing the 3-15 minute delay. It looks like aMember is getting notification within seconds. No idea on how to troubleshoot your problem though.
Yes it is difficult to troubleshoot I still have not resolved this problem. I have other websites hosted on different servers at lunarpages. If I goto my ccbill account and configure the IPN.PHP to a dummy script on one of my other webaccounts at lunarpages on a different server then the I see the IPN notification right away. For some reason when going back to the correct server (i.e. the one with amember installed) I assume the first request is being dropped, and eventually the retransmit of transaction(which appears to be every 4 minutes) will go through. I called CCBILL and they tested sending the IPN.PHP to one of their internal servers on their domain and it immediately went through. I guess maybe I need to go to a VPS plan or dedicated plan so that I would be able to sniff the network traffic and see why the initial request is not going through. Like I said if I switch to a different server then the transaction request is seen immediately like in your case. It would just suck to upgrade to a newer plan on lunarpages and still have the problem. Lunarpages has not been helpful at all in troubleshooting the problem. Anyway just venting because it makes it look like we are crooks in taking money and not giving them immediate access. By the way I have not gone live yet til this problem is resolved so we are only perceived crooks in my mind I even thought about the forwarding the request from a server that works to the right server and see if that would work but it would introduce an unnecessary level of problems if that server ever went down. Jimmy
Just as a follow up in case this issue hits someone else in the future. I went ahead and purchased a VPS account thru LunarPages. Just having total control is important to me. So I switched CCBILL to call a stub IPN.PHP on my vps account that just dumped the vars to disk on server. I was also able to use tcpdump on my VPS account to see the packets. Sure enough CCBILL was sending IPN request everytime. That is when I noticed the IP address was different than the one I saw that finally completed when using our shared account. So at this point I knew that our shared server must have had the IP blocked for whatever reason. I contacted lunarpages they verified and unblocked the IP address. Now we work flawlessly on our existing shared account. We are still going to move everything over to VPS anyway. So if anyone else hits this issue think IP BLOCKED first. Its a little hard to find the IP address to notify the hosting company about without having a VPS account or dedicated server though. tcpdump or tethereal is your friend. Anyway I couldn't be happier with amember software and CCBILL integration. Thanks to all that helped me solve this problem. Jimmy