Question

No route to host

Posted on April 11, 2019
Networking
Asked by jarland

When trying to reach out to an external server from my droplet, I am getting a “No route to host” error. What do I do?

(This question is part of a series in which we ask questions using language that is similar to common support tickets, to improve our publicly searchable support database)

Submit an answer

This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

jarland

DigitalOcean Employee

• April 11, 2019

Accepted Answer

Greetings!

The first thing you need to do is make sure that your droplet is online at all. Testing outbound traffic is sufficient for this case. Try pinging servers that you know should respond, like:

ping 8.8.8.8

Or even:

ping cloudflare.com

If these fail, your droplet’s network may be down or your firewall may be blocking the outbound traffic. Try disabling the firewall for good measure. One of these commands should do it:

service iptables stop
systemctl stop iptables
systemctl stop firewalld
ufw disable

If this has no impact, and all outbound traffic is still failing, reference this post:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/having-trouble-with-the-network-on-your-droplet

If you did actually confirm that outbound traffic is working, just not to the end-point that you are trying to reach, then you should try running an MTR to see where it fails. You can find a tutorial to help you with that here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-traceroute-and-mtr-to-diagnose-network-issues

Where the MTR drops will determine who can remedy this. If it drops right before reaching the end point, at the datacenter for the other server, then the other server is likely blocking your traffic. If it drops inside of our network, perhaps you should open a ticket and give us the MTR results:

https://www.digitalocean.com/company/contact

Jarland