I’ve been running mikrotik (x86) hotspot + usermanager + paypal for 3 years, but as of September 5th I’ve been having paypal issues.
When a customer signs up to make a new account and pays with paypal, the funds are transfered to my paypal account, but no time is credited to the customers usermanager account. Looking through the logs I see:
Over the last three weeks I’m seeing the “PayPal - bad http response” error happen on about 90% of all transactions. This is really annoying as the customer gets billed, we receive payment, but the usermanager just errors out. From the customer’s perspective everything looks fine from signup to the paypal redirect back to the router, until they try to log in with their new account and get an "Invalid username or password error.
Has something changed with paypal’s API in the last few weeks? We haven’t changed anything on our setup, network and software-wise. I’ve tried upgrading from 4.17 → 5.20 and the problem is still occuring. Is anyone else having this issue???
Seems PayPal changed their IPN call back method in September, which is when User Manager started to fail - quite likely when they moved everything to Akamai.
Octavio - do you have the support ticket number so I can send Mikrotik some more information on this change by PayPal as they may not read this post?
We have lost a lot of reputation on our Hotspots in Guernsey as every payment went through, but PayPal was no longer communicating with UM in the same way anymore and have now had to switch over to a “24/7 trial” setting on Hotspot as User Manager no longer works with PayPal.
Nest
thank you for shedding some light on this.
We have had to monitor every transaction (keeping an eye on emails) to quickly manually fix each account and notify the clients as soon as possible.
Fortunately we lost only a few.
Rolling out Radiusmanager 4 on monday. cant wait. Highly recommended. Viktors support and speed in replying is priceless!!!
v-sat. We bought Radius Manager (v3) a couple of years back, but we were never able to get our billing method to work with it. We were assured again and again in emails it would do it (and Viktor IS very good at support) however despite all the assurances, it did not do what he told us it would. I believe this was a break down in understanding our requirement or a language barrier as like I said, his responses were fast but sadly, in the end, unhelpful. So we are now stuck with a system we have paid for and never used and we went back to using User Manager!
All we wanted to do, is what every other Hotspot in Europe I have ever used does. A client pays for say, “1 hour” and from the time they first login, the clock starts. If they don’t use it, they lose it! The problem we had was that Radmanager, as brilliant as it is (and we recommend and support it for any WISPS selling fixed connections), cannot cut someone off after they have been online or not after that 1hr. A voucher or account that has say 1hr should run out after 1hr, however what actually happens is that they can connect for 5 mins, switch off for a year and then they still have another 55mins left to go before they are cut off. In fact, if a client only uses it for 5 mins a day, they make their money go a long way. We want it so that once they first login, that time starts and just keeps on going until the time they bought runs out. Even if they are not using it.
The other problem was that if a client bought a day of time at 23:59, he only actually got 6 mins of online time as at 00:05, his account was promptly cut off as Rad Manager looked at the date and it as it was now 1 more day further on, it thinks that the account is now a day older and expires their account!
We don’t want that. User Manager understands our method of usage (as that is how every other Hotspot I have ever used works!) and supports it. Except of course, it no longer works at all with PayPal now.
Now, if someone can tell me if v4 of Radius manager can do this billing method (and give me service settings to demonstrate it on our own server we still have it running on!) we will stop using UM immediately as we need to get this sorted asap.
The changes that paypal made to their system is the reason for the failures. My system has been experiencing the same problems for the same amount of time. Here are two links from paypal that describe their change. https://ppmts.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/92
and https://www.x.com/node/217895/
The problem I am still having is I added the address ipnpb.paypal.com to the walled gardens, but still get bad http response error. The silence from MT on this forum regarding this issue has been deafening. Perhaps because it was not their change that broke the system. I am going to open a support ticket with MT and see where it leads. All of my other efforts to this point have not been successful. If someone has figured out the required adjustment it would be great if it were posted.
