How to debug/solve a "ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT" error when this error happens on some browsers but not in another?
Hello.
I am managing a Droplet that hosts a light website named "https://onlyonecolombia.com/". I've seen this page working perfectly fine a few days, but one of the customers says he can not see the page, no matter what browser he uses, no matter how many times he clears each browser's cache, cookies, etc. from the beginning of time.
In the beginning I thought this was a local customer network issue, because while he was not able to see the page, I was, as well as many other clients in different networks and geographical areas. I rebooted the droplet once, and then the customer that said that could not see the page now was able to see it normally, but after a few minutes, he received the same error again.
But today I'm having the same issue. I can not access that page from Google Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer nor Opera. I don't have any web-site blocking component (firewall, proxy, etc.) and I have not changed anything on the droplet (again, I'm the only one administrating it). Now if I reboot the droplet it does not seem to help.
I installed **Tor browser**, enabled JavaScript, Cookies and Plugins, and from there I can access the page as expected. One of the customers said that when accessing using some kind of plugin to hide the real location/identity of the browser, the page loaded fine. I did not configure any kind of restriction to this application or apache server to cause that.
Here are some tests I've made:
```
#>ping onlyonecolombia.com
Pinging onlyonecolombia.com [45.55.158.123] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 45.55.158.123: bytes=32 time=124ms TTL=51
Reply from 45.55.158.123: bytes=32 time=122ms TTL=51
Reply from 45.55.158.123: bytes=32 time=122ms TTL=51
Reply from 45.55.158.123: bytes=32 time=135ms TTL=51
Ping statistics for 45.55.158.123:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 122ms, Maximum = 135ms, Average = 125ms
#>tracert onlyonecolombia.com
Tracing route to onlyonecolombia.com [45.55.158.123]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.0.1
2 79 ms 29 ms 42 ms Dynamic-IP-18686761.cable.net.co [186.86.76.1]
3 11 ms 12 ms 37 ms 172.21.113.46
4 15 ms 55 ms 52 ms Static-IP-1901577189.cable.net.co [190.157.7.189]
5 140 ms 79 ms 79 ms 10.14.14.45
6 86 ms 85 ms 108 ms 64.86.28.41
7 87 ms 89 ms 127 ms if-9-0-0-0.tcore1.MLN-Miami.as6453.net [63.243.152.9]
8 90 ms 89 ms 125 ms ae-6.r04.miamfl02.us.bb.gin.ntt.net [129.250.9.33]
9 97 ms 114 ms 111 ms ae-3.r20.miamfl02.us.bb.gin.ntt.net [129.250.2.110]
10 129 ms 122 ms 154 ms ae-4.r23.asbnva02.us.bb.gin.ntt.net [129.250.2.86]
11 155 ms 118 ms 116 ms ae-0.r22.asbnva02.us.bb.gin.ntt.net [129.250.3.84]
12 127 ms * 142 ms ae-8.r23.nycmny01.us.bb.gin.ntt.net [129.250.2.148]
13 120 ms 120 ms 139 ms ae-1.r06.nycmny01.us.bb.gin.ntt.net [129.250.4.149]
14 141 ms 131 ms 125 ms xe-0-4-0-11.r06.nycmny01.us.ce.gin.ntt.net [129.250.204.114]
15 123 ms 103 ms 108 ms 162.243.188.234
16 139 ms 140 ms 122 ms onlyonecolombia.com [45.55.158.123]
Trace complete.
```
Also, here is the website's Zone file content (as displayed by DigitalOcean in the DNS management page):
```
$ORIGIN onlyonecolombia.com.
$TTL 1800
onlyonecolombia.com. IN SOA ns1.digitalocean.com. hostmaster.onlyonecolombia.com. 1435073711 10800 3600 604800 1800
onlyonecolombia.com. 1800 IN NS ns1.digitalocean.com.
onlyonecolombia.com. 1800 IN NS ns2.digitalocean.com.
onlyonecolombia.com. 1800 IN NS ns3.digitalocean.com.
onlyonecolombia.com. 1800 IN A 45.55.158.123
www.onlyonecolombia.com. 1800 IN CNAME onlyonecolombia.com.
*.onlyonecolombia.com. 1800 IN CNAME onlyonecolombia.com.
```
I have normal access via SSH, the Apache service is running, PHP is ok as well, I've extended the timeout settings in PHP to around 2 minutes, but the "ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT" error appears before that time in most of the cases. The databases are working fine as well.
Checking the server status via HTOP, I see the server is running fine, using less than 5% of the CPU, and around a 25% of the RAM (4 GB in total):
```
root@onlyonecolombia:/var/log/apache2# htop
1 [| 1.3%] Tasks: 102, 48 thr; 1 running
2 [ 0.0%] Load average: 0.06 0.03 0.05
Mem[||||||||||||| 906/3953MB] Uptime: 01:42:57
Swp[ 0/0MB]
```
Apache access and error logs do not show irregularities. The only thing I noticed there is that when I try to access the application from one of the browsers with the problem, the access log in apache does not move. I see that by using
```
root@onlyonecolombia:/var/log/apache2# tail -f -n 500 access.log
```
The same goes for the error log: no entries when accessing from a browser with the problem.
One thing to note, is that I installed iRedMail right after creating the droplet, because I needed this droplet to have a Mail server for that domain as well, which so far is working just fine.
We have SSL configured for this website, and internal redirection from HTTP to HTTPS in the main application, which is working fine too.
I'm running out of options here, and of course I can not tell all customers to use Tor browser to access this specific website, so I would like to ask for any advice here. If there is anything I've missed please let me know.
Thanks.
Probably some issue with either
We can’t figure out where this comes from without logs, configurations etc.
I don’t have that magic yet ;)