I use paypal's subscription option on my webpage to create username/password and take care of billing. After I rebooted the machine because it had crashed I noticed I kept getting emails from paypal saying that there was an error with the subscriptions. I contacted paypal and they said that it sounds like my server is having problems contacting paypal.com I tried pinging paypal.com from my command line and I get nothing. Any ideas what I can try?

I've looked at the error log when I get the error emails and there is nothing that corresponds.

What error do you get? Try and maybe traceroute paypal.com

it might be a dns error, might be something funky with YOUR firewall, maybe your banned someplace on a router. Lots of different things possible try the traceroute and show what that and the ping reports.

The ping stays frozen right here..

root@blah [~]# ping paypal.com
PING paypal.com (64.4.241.16) from My I P: 56(84) bytes of data.

7 p64-0-0-0.r20.snjsca04.us.bb.verio.net (129.250.2.71) 44.891 ms 44.745 ms 44.730 ms
8 ge-1-1.a00.snjsca04.us.ra.verio.net (129.250.31.81) 44.824 ms 44.866 ms 44.961 ms
9 ge-3-2.a00.snjsca04.us.ce.verio.net (128.241.219.46) 44.973 ms 44.874 ms 44.708 ms
10 border2.pc2-0-bbnet2.sje.pnap.net (66.151.144.69) 72.564 ms 45.283 ms 45.118 ms
11 * * *
12 * * *

Traceroute times out.

PayPal blocks the packets needed for a ping to complete; it's perfectly normal for your pings to timeout.

What happens when you try to access PayPal through something like lynx?

I can get to it through lynx

Then there are no communication problems between your server and paypal (most likely)... what errors do you get with your script?

The following error message was generated while trying to acknowledge IPN:
Notification could not be acknowledged due to a network or PayPal issue. PayPal will retry until it succeeds.

It then lists the subscribers email and other information on the transaction numbers. It says paypal will try again and it does, but I just keep getting those errors. The person from paypal says that it is a problem with the server not contacting paypal. Still don't understand why I can ping any other domain except paypal.