I've been stuck at 34 weeks behind for the past week. When I hover over the progress bar it says 183635 blocks, then if I hover over it again it says 183635 blocks processed, minutes later. If I start from scratch, it'll be catching up but eventually just locks up again and stops making any progress. How can I fix this?
If neither of these solutions help you with the problem, please feel free to stop in to freenode IRC channel #clams and we would be happy to help you debug the problem.
There was a guy in the JD chat yesterday who couldn't ever get a single connection to a CLAM node, although he had managed to sync part of the Bitcoin blockchain in the past.
After a few hours of back and forth with him, it turned out that he was on a college network and couldn't make outgoing connections on most ports. Port 80 was open, and so was port 8080. If I ran a CLAM node and told it to listen for incoming connections on port 8080 (port=8080 in clam.conf), and gave him the IP address. Using an "addnode' command he was able to get a connection and finish syncing the blockchain.
Edit: I should mention that
http://portquiz.net:31174/ is a good tool for diagnosing such issues. Replace 31174 by various ports until you're able to get a connection. If you see:
Outgoing port tester
This server listens on all TCP ports, allowing you to test any outbound TCP port.
You have reached this page on port 31174.
it means you are able to connect out on that port.