Wow Daedalon,
thanks for a very complete response. This seems quite complicated but I guess it’s best to know if it’s my server, because than I can stop blaming myself.
I’ll defenitely get back here to tell you how it went.
I’m currently corresponding with my hostingcompany.
They ask for an example of a working & not working environment.
Now I tried it on a localhost where it worked, but I oviously I can’t direct them to that. Do you maybe have an example of a site where the video-thumbnails plugin works correctly with vimeo. The not working example I already have of course 😀
Thanks to debugging your case, I found a Vimeo video on their front page that I embedded on my site about Russian culture: http://ruscult.com/moscow-2011-motion-timelapse/
The thumbnail is at http://ruscult.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/232282582_640.jpg, will likely be seen at http://ruscult.com/top/ for the next days and thanks for this thread, I’m likely to implement it soon to my yet-to-be-released plugin that makes the Next and Previous links below the post.
The links at the right side are related posts, but they’re not sorted by the relevancy. At the moment http://ruscult.com/russian-engineering-roads-almost-unnecessary/ shows the thumbnail (those two posts are in the same category), but that might change by time.
Thanks again,
I’m currently trying to figure out how to use wget. But this is defenitely a mystery to me. What do I exactly need to do to be able to make these requests? Where do I need to install what and how is it possible to make these requests on your server via the commandprompt on your computer. I’m working on a windows computer.
Maybe you can help a noob like me a little bit more… Thanks for your patience.
For making those commands on your server you need a shell access there. Some hosts provide only an FTP account, some also give you the shell access. If you have shell access, use a program like PuTTY to connect to the server by the secure SSH protocol (the default).
If you don’t have shell access, you can ask if your host will give you one. Sometimes it’s available for free for those who ask but not given as default, since the powerful shell access is easier to use for attacking the system. The less shell accounts given, the smaller chances one of them ends up in the wrong hands.
However, your host admins can definitely do the traceroutes by themselves on their own servers in case you don’t have access there. If you want to give them a comparison, you can share with them the result you got from home. Here’s a link to one of them as a curiosity: http://network-tools.com/default.asp?prog=trace&host=b.vimeocdn.com
I apparantly do not have shell acces. According to the information on my hostingsite they are not going to give it easily. So I asked if they could do the request for me. Hope this will give me a solution.
I’ll get back.
The host admins should be able to figure out if and why the files http://vimeo.com/api/v2/video/20639284.php and http://b.vimeocdn.com/ts/132/102/132102854_640.jpg are unreachable from their server. Could be something with their firewall rules. Video Thumbnails uses Curl to get the file in case they want to double-check with that.
Good luck!
At this moment video-thumbnails is finding the right link, but placing 0kb images in my uploadsfolder wich it sets as featured image. My host added these to their whitelist.
vimeo.com (74.113.233.128)
b.vimeocdn.com (62.58.34.18)
It is progress I guess, but still not the result I need. You know some other IP-addresses that maybe need to be allowed for video-thumbnais to work?
Before the addition you didn’t get any image at all from Vimeo and now you get, but it’s an empty one? What’s the filename of this/these new Vimeo thumbnails you’ve gotten?
I don’t see 62.58.34.18 being among the IPs listed in the domain DNS records: http://network-tools.com/default.asp?prog=dnsrec&host=b.vimeocdn.com
The currently listed IPs are 96.7.41.24 and 96.7.41.25. However, if possible, your hosting provider should allow access to those domain names regardless of the IPs as the IPs may to change over time.
I wonder where they got the IP 62.58.34.18 from. It could be that’s the original cause of the problem, if for some reason the connections from their server to b.vimeocdn.com have been redirected to the wrong IP address. However, in that case adding the domains to their whitelist would have resulted in the change from no image to empty image only if they also had either one or both blocked before.
Sutherland: I don’t see any checks in code to make sure curl_exec() doesn’t return an empty string while retrieving the thumbnail on line 270. The result of the call is written to the file system without checking the validity of the result.
Should we add a check for this and the appropriate error messages to let the user know if whether was the retrieval of video info or thumbnail that failed? That would help users debug future cases; they could just contact their host admin and copy-paste the information that says “connection to xx.xx.xx.xx failed”. WP_Error would be the way to go.
Sutherland: Here’s the patch incorporating everything I’ve changed so far. Would you be willing to include it? We could probably remove most of the if (!function_exists('curl_init')) checks by adding one in the beginning of function get_video_thumbnail resulting in a cleaner and faster code.
Berendvaneerde: This could be useful for debugging your case as fell. We’ve gotten quite far already, but it never hurts to be armed with more information.
The updated version provides useful error messages, incorporates my previous patch and expand it to support Dailymotion with https, with or without the www prefix and with or without the protocol prefix as all of these work.
Other sites didn’t seem to support https so didn’t expand the support there. Improvements include small updates in the comments, for example properly listing the supported sites in plugin description and calling Blip.tv’s catched URL embeds, not files. Justin.tv’s support was left unchanged as all of their videos redirect to Twitch.tv, which should be supported separately.
Didn’t do any coding standard cleanups. A useful thing to do would be replacing all if( with if ( to keep the spacing standard across the code. For further cleanups see WordPress Coding Standards.
Indeed what you say is correct. I actually got more than one images per embed (after they added the IP’s to their list) with for one example the following names:
126607517_640.jpg
126607517_6401.jpg
126607517_6406.jpg
After trying out your patch I got the following message:
Error retrieving a thumbnail from the URL http://b.vimeocdn.com/ts/132/139/132139943_640.jpg: socket error: 111. If opening that URL in your web browser shows an image, the problem may be related to your web server and might be something your server administrator can solve.
Getting there step by step I hope!
They now say they’ve added a series of IP’s (62.58.34.0/24) because bvimeo seems to use more than just one.
Still no luck though.
What do you think I should tell them. You say they need to add the whole domain and not the IP’s? Does the socket error: 111 help in any way?
As shown in my previous post, at one moment b.vimeocdn.com was shown as directing to the IPs 96.7.41.24 and 96.7.41.25 which are not included in in the IP range 62.58.34.0/24.
Now http://network-tools.com/default.asp?prog=dnsrec&host=b.vimeocdn.com shows the following result:
a1638.g.akamai.net CNAME a1638.g.akamai.net.0.1.cn.akamaitech.net 20s
The time to live (TTL) is only 20 seconds, after which the records are updated. I checked twice more and got:
Answer records
a1638.g.akamai.net.0.1.cn.akamaitech.net A 213.248.113.160 20s
a1638.g.akamai.net.0.1.cn.akamaitech.net A 213.248.113.186 20s
a1638.g.akamai.net.0.1.cn.akamaitech.net A 80.239.255.41 20s
a1638.g.akamai.net.0.1.cn.akamaitech.net A 80.239.255.8 20s
Something you can try from your Windows’ command line: ping -a b.vimeocdn.com. I got Ping host a1638.g.akamai.net [87.108.18.42], which is yet one more IP number.
Error 111 is a curl error. You can try searching for more info about it: https://eu2.startpage.com/do/metasearch.pl?q=curl+error+111
I’ve updated my version to give even more helpful error messages. Did some other updates as well. Please see next post.
The new 1.7.6-daedalon2 version contains the following changes to 1.7.6-daedalon:
- Error messages now display libcurl error code and link to libcurl error code page whenever possible
- Code is now formatted as much according to WordPress Coding Standards as I could in two hours
- Minor speed optimizations to the code, like using ‘ instead of ” in echo statements when appropriate and removing unnecessary whitespace from the end of the lines to minimize HTML
About your host: yes, they would need add every IP or IP range that b.vimeocdn.com redirects to, one way or another.
Did you get multiple thumbnails per post by trying the Video Thumnbail retrieval multiple times or just once? If you’re getting one image per one retrieval attempt, that’s how it currently should work. Noticing this inspired a new topic: [Plugin: Video Thumbnails] Idea: When reseting video thumbnail, delete old or if same, keep old suggesting we don’t save a new thumbnail if it’s exactly the same as the old one.
I’m sorry for being not so technical, but are this all the IP’s
http://network-tools.com/default.asp?prog=dnsrec&host=b.vimeocdn.com
or will they change over time? How is it possible to add every IP if vimeo keeps using others?
Again, thanks for your help and happy new year!
