so I got a guy to code this IPN feature for my website. Basically a user pays thought the main site then it forwards the ipn stuff to another server and that server sends ipn payment to paypal. For some reason it keeps saying "retrying" under the paypal IPN history. Is paypal blocking this and does the payment have to be made from the same server? Thanks hopefully this makes sense!
IPN does not happen until after any transaction has occurred, so what you're saying here doesn't really make sense. There's no way IPN would be sending any payment to PayPal. PayPal simply POSTs transaction data to your IPN URL after the transaction has taken place.
That said, if you're seeing "retrying" in your IPN History that means your IPN script is not completing successfully, and as such, is not returning a 200 result code back to PayPal's server. You need to troubleshoot your IPN script to figure out what's failing and get it fixed.
Your web server logs should provide the information you need. If you look there you should see a log of when your IPN URL was hit and it should also provide the result including any errors that were generated from the request to that script.
I like to create a simple HTML form with the action set to my IPN URL and then include hidden fields that match the fields/values that I would expect to get from IPN. This way you can load that in a browser and submit it directly so that you can see the result on screen which can help with troubleshooting and debugging.
Keep in mind that when testing that way, though, the data is not coming from PayPal's servers, so it will not verify. You'll need to make sure your script is setup to handle this accordingly for testing purposes.