Connectivity Troubleshooting Support Articles

Generated on 5 Jun 2023

This troubleshooting guide can help you diagnose networking issues to resolve issues including:

Being unable to ping your Droplet from any device or application.
Being unable to reach the internet using your Droplet’s network connection.
Droplet network configuration changes not persisting after a reboot.

Specifically, this guide explains how to check each component in the network chain in order: DigitalOcean Load Balancers, DigitalOcean Cloud Firewalls, Droplet firewalls, and Droplet network configuration (including its network interface and DNS configuration).

If you are having trouble connecting to your Droplet using SSH, see our SSH Troubleshooting Guide first.

When to Consider Migration or Redeployment

In some cases, such as an accidental recursive rm or chmod command, or incorrect network configurations can lock you out of the Droplet permanently. Other issues may appear as connection issues, but reveal much deeper issues with no clear resolution. This includes:

Corrupted file systems
Erroneous file system permissions and file ownership
Broken system packages and required libraries

To get your deployment back online quickly, determine if trying to troubleshoot the connection is the right solution for your problem or if you should begin focusing on recovering your data for redeployment.

You can typically identify boot-up errors through the Droplet console startup output. Issues pertaining to the file system or any startup failures that prevent a working console login session are signs that troubleshooting your network configuration may not be the better option. In situations like this, the best approach is to salvage what you can. In some cases, a good backup or snapshot strategy can permit a more rapid recovery of a previous working environment, or DigitalOcean Load Balancers may make spinning up a new Droplet and re-deploying that faster solution to getting your deployment running again.

What to Do Before Troubleshooting

If you’ve decided that troubleshooting is right for your situation, go through the following steps:

Check the control panel. Before anything else, make sure there are no ongoing issues, like an outage in the region impacting your Droplet.
Check if Droplet is disabled because of abuse. Droplets are sometimes disabled due to the detection of abusive activity. If your Droplet has been disabled, an email has been sent to the email address linked to your DigitalOcean account with the title Networking Disabled: <your-droplet-name>. You can also log in to the support portal to see if any support tickets have been created for your resources.

If your Droplet has been disabled due to suspected abuse, contact our support team for further information.
Recover root access. If you do not have the current root password, reset it using the reset root password function in the control panel.
Access the Recovery Console. If you cannot log in to the Droplet, the Recovery Console is another way to gain access (as long as your Droplet is running and you have a working root password).
Reboot your Droplet. Many connectivity problems can be resolved after a reboot. If you’re experiencing connectivity issues, try rebooting the Droplet and see if this resolves the issue.

Before rebooting your Droplet, we highly recommend taking a snapshot of it. This allows you to redeploy your Droplet in its current configuration if rebooting the Droplet causes more serious problems.

To reboot your Droplet, log in to it and run the following command:
```
sudo reboot
```
Review file management and permissions. Some of these solutions may require you to review or edit files on the system or manage permissions.
Check logs. Once you can get into the Droplet, check the system’s log files for more information to identify the error so you can then look up a solution.

You can learn more about the logs on your server with this Linux logging tutorial and this journalctl and systemd logging tutorial.

Check if your service is running. If you are experiencing connection problems with a service on your Droplet, it’s useful to verify which services are running on the Droplet. Sometimes a service might go down or be under heavy load, which can cause down or intermittent connections.

On your Droplet, you can view the services currently bound to a port by running netstat:
```
sudo netstat -plunt
```
The -plunt flag returns more brief and readable output.

netstat returns output similar to this:
```
Active Internet connections (only servers)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address           Foreign Address         State       PID/Program name
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:80              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      13704/nginx -g daem
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:22              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      1762/sshd       
tcp6       0      0 :::80                   :::*                    LISTEN      13704/nginx -g daem
tcp6       0      0 :::22                   :::*                    LISTEN      1762/sshd
```
Check the port numbers and interfaces in the Local Address column against your expected services. If one of your expected services is not present in the netstat output, your service isn’t running. This would cause connection attempts to fail.

Next Steps

If you’ve checked these common problems and logs, proceed to the next step and check your load balancer’s connectivity. If you do not have a load balancer connected to your Droplet, proceed to either the cloud or Droplet level firewall troubleshooting steps.

Check Your Load Balancer's Connectivity

Diagnose and troubleshoot firewall and load balancer issues that could be causing network connectivity issues.

Check Your Cloud Firewall Settings

Diagnose and troubleshoot firewall issues that could be causing network connectivity issues.

Check Your Droplet Firewall Settings

Check things like Droplet status and logs before continuing to diagnose network issues.

Check Your Droplet's Network Configuration

Diagnose and troubleshoot your Droplet’s network configuration.