E-mail shot after failed 9.0 upgrade??

[PSCGi]

What a load gang, this is outrageous we have to put up with junk
like this and they've already ruined the marketplace as it is. We've
had enough of this slop, no reason an upgrade like this is as (#*$(
as it really is...

Our mail stopped dead after we attempted to perform the 9.0
upgrade. We did the 8.6 versions, everything was stable, now
after trying and getting constant failure and dependency reports
with bad checksums galore - we can't get fully back to 8.6 and
the mail stopped dead on the 11th. Totally unreal.

I can send a relay mail from home ona server account and it'll fly,
I can be in Horde and send out - it arrives, like at my Gmail account.

All replies - black holed. Nada.

Here's the stupidity. Service Management shows that Qmail is
STOPPED. No reason, won't restart or even start either.

Stupidity? Watchdog constantly says Qmail is UP. And when I
go in and do service restarts of all types - Qmail is always UP and
100%. Yet the CP says otherwise and everyone's getting rejection
notices saying this server won't respond. Port OK, connections OK,
just that it doesn't answer so it's delayed until the timer expires on
their end or I get this fixed in 48 hours.

Does anyone have a clue on any way to restore Qmail on an 8.6.0
box without backing things up, relayering Plesk and all that junk? We
don't have hours on end to spend on this and not a budget to let
Parallels make tons of money off our misery from their damn junk
that should've never EVER been released yet by a longshot. If there's
stock, I hope it tanks and the unemployment line grows because I'm
sick of getting chewed out over stupid things like this we can't easily
fix.

I tried some suggestions here in the Forums, so far some worked
to overlay files, etc. but nothing that makes the connection to get
us back to a working 8.6.0 box - that's all we want. Then there's
time to sit with the HSP and decide what else we can do, including
the ultra-dreaded Windows route and it's huge security headaches
and hacks, to move everything to a new platform without all this BS.

Once again, Parallels needs to be slapped. Taken outside, lined up,
given pink slips and shot if anyone's bored at the time. No reason or
excuse for such garbage work and all the bitching on the Forums
they ignore demonstrates time and again this is the WORST it's been.
Every time from 7 to 8, ya problems, but this time it's over the edge!

Dave
PSCGi

 

[247trader]

there are a couple of things to note of this.

1) do not use qmail in the plesk stock configuration.
2) always use daemontools
3) run courier under daemontools
4) run spamassassin directly and not with psa-spamassassin

I upgraded to 9.0.0 from 8.6 and it is totally messed up. The one thing I can tell you is that if I was running they way they want to run it my mail server would be dead at this point. Not really a place I want to be.

The only thing I have outstanding now is that spamassassin does not delete spam. It creates alternate messages in the spool directory and then sends out a rejection notice to the spammer.

So if you will set your system to run under daemontools then your mail server will come back up and work.

 

[PSCGi]

OK, I'm in that 'bad' place you're talking about and no time to be
screwing around with Parallel's joke of an OS...

But forgive my ignorance, all that sounds great but what/where is
it? Preloaded? Am I going grab it somewhere or what? Never
heard of that as a mail program at all or I don't get what it's doing
to solve my Qmail problem. Why they just didn't use Sendmail is
still beyond me and screwing with it now makes even less sense!

The box is a RHL Fedora Core 8 based setup that in my heated
state I forgot to mention, so if that's Ubuntu or Debian or any
other OS I may not have it or be able to use it.

But links will help tremendously, gotta get the mail back up!

 

[Zarik]

I can send a relay mail from home ona server account and it'll fly,
I can be in Horde and send out - it arrives, like at my Gmail account.

All replies - black holed. Nada.

Dave
PSCGi

Daved, try to disable SPF protection in the Mail server settings. It is buggy even after applying the hotfix: http://kb.odin.com/en/5847

http://forum.swsoft.com/showthread.php?t=56964

Hope this will help.

 

[PSCGi]

Here's the problem... we never used SPF because it was giving us fits earlier
AND we also had to kill the BL's because one we had in there was eating
everything in sight. So all of that's been off even prior to the upgrade attempts!

E-mail is getting out just fine. And you can jump into Horde and send an
outbound message with ease so it's not a header thing as that suggests.

This is totally where Qmail on the Control Panel says it's not working and
therefore all inbound mail is stopped dead with no logs as to what won't
fire up right or why the rejections. Been digging for days! Now in the
SSH level, it says Qmail and everything else is AOK and running fine. And
Watchdog, evidently watching at that level - also reports there are no
malfunctions. So this seems to be a case where why is the CP reporting
Qmail down, won't start the service at all regardless if the box on the SSH
level says it is and all is well?

I just need to determine why Qmail isn't firing back up and fix it. No time
for a learning curve to replace it with another MTA, no reason why Qmail
isn't working now. If I go anywhere I'm going right back to Sendmail as it
is because I never had these issues with Ensim, RaQs, Sendmail or any other
boxes we've used. Just Plesk, which is why we stayed away from Plesk
for years and years until we were left with no choice.

 

[PSCGi]

OK,

May be salvation but it's detailed....

Performed the Hotfix4 and Hotfix5 rollbacks using the info
here on other Forums posts (I'll try to update with links later)
and that worked...

Used Autoinstaller on the SSH level, NOT the Control Panel
to upgrade from 8.6 to 9.0 - successful!

Had to log out and log back in on the CP to clear a false
License Key error that occurred, got one more warning but
it's a buggy Application I don't care about and means nothing
at this point in time.

During the Autoinstall - picked QMAIL over Postfix for the
MTA! Only place such a selection exists, does not exist
in the CP version I ever saw.

Upgrade went, relogged into CP - sent mail from Gmail
to one of my server accounts...

BINGO!

So far, so good, let's see what else happens. But on
FC8 versions, you can get from 8.6 to 9.0 in this fashion.
More to come!

 

[hgmichna]

Used Autoinstaller on the SSH level, NOT the Control Panel to upgrade from 8.6 to 9.0 - successful!

...

During the Autoinstall - picked QMAIL over Postfix for the
MTA! Only place such a selection exists, does not exist
in the CP version I ever saw.

I seem to have a similar problem. I can send mail, but at least one other user cannot, over none of his mail accounts.

How do you use the autoinstaller directly? I'm not a Linux expert, but I can do it if I can find the function.

Hans

 

[PSCGi]

Well the mail problem doesn't sound right? I've never read an outbound
problem like that, either it's all working or one-way only or not at all...

That sounds more like a port block or IP blacklist of the place(s) he's
sending mail from through the server and it's blocking him as a spammer.
Otherwise none of you could send mail in that situation?

The Autoinstaller, search 'autoinstaller' here in Plesk for Linux and
you'll hit the post I did, I believe it may also talk about the Hotfix
rollbacks. I'll ty to post the link to the message shortly, I'm just
overloaded trying to clean the rest of the aftermath up! But it's
very easy to use if you know how to use your Telnet/SSH inside
your server. Actually Telnet's bad news, so you should be using
an external SSH link with a client like PuTTY (free) that lets you
jump into your box from anywhere and perform this stuff, look at
logs and far more.

Just imagine it's kinda like FTP but more old-school text.

 

[ClassicTuxedo]

That certainly fixed my problem, though....Thanks!!

I was getting emails coming through to Outlook/Thunderbird etc totally unparsed. The headers were in the email and all HTML code was showing, instead of a nice pretty email.

Disabling the SPF fixed it. Thank you!!

 

[onsightdata]

Classic Tuxedo You can fix your spf issue so you can turn it back on ,

http://kb.odin.com/en/5847 provides you the info and file you require

 

[247trader]

Here's the problem... we never used SPF because it was giving us fits earlier
AND we also had to kill the BL's because one we had in there was eating
everything in sight. So all of that's been off even prior to the upgrade attempts!

E-mail is getting out just fine. And you can jump into Horde and send an
outbound message with ease so it's not a header thing as that suggests.

This is totally where Qmail on the Control Panel says it's not working and
therefore all inbound mail is stopped dead with no logs as to what won't
fire up right or why the rejections. Been digging for days! Now in the
SSH level, it says Qmail and everything else is AOK and running fine. And
Watchdog, evidently watching at that level - also reports there are no
malfunctions. So this seems to be a case where why is the CP reporting
Qmail down, won't start the service at all regardless if the box on the SSH
level says it is and all is well?

I just need to determine why Qmail isn't firing back up and fix it. No time
for a learning curve to replace it with another MTA, no reason why Qmail
isn't working now. If I go anywhere I'm going right back to Sendmail as it
is because I never had these issues with Ensim, RaQs, Sendmail or any other
boxes we've used. Just Plesk, which is why we stayed away from Plesk
for years and years until we were left with no choice.

I feel your pain but the one thing I can tell you is that Qmail blows the doors off of Sendmail. Sendmail requires too much maintanence in order to simple things like redirect mail and the like. Now don't get me wrong, I have used both on a massive scale and Qmail is by far the best choice.

The problem you are feeling is not with Qmail, it is with the way Plesk did it. Qmail was designed to run a particular way, unfortunately, Plesk does not run it that way. They opted to change the configuration to run it under inetd which is totally against the original creators way and method. I can tell you from years of experience that if you screw with the simple way qmail starts you will ultimately end up running into trouble.

So here is my suggestion and actually this takes very little time to do and makes Qmail bullet proof.

1) have a look at http://www.lifewithqmail.com
2) download and compile ucspi-tcp, http://cr.yp.to/ucspi-tcp/ucspi-tcp-0.88.tar.gz and daemontools, http://cr.yp.to/daemontools/daemontools-0.76.tar.gz
3) go here http://www.din.or.jp/~ushijima/qmail-conf.html and get the software and compile the scripts. These make it really easy to setup the services
4) change the startup scripts to mirror the information in /etc/xinet.d/smtp_psa and /etc/xinet.d/smtps_psa
5) replace /etc/rc.d/init.d/qmail with qmailctl from lifewithqmail.

Once you do this then you will not only have a system that works all the time and you never have to worry about but you get greater control over how it works. There is nothing like actually being able to control one service without having to restart inetd for everything.

Now obviously all of these will not fix your issues in 5 minutes but at least you can figure out what is going on and in most cases you will actually bypass the issues the Plesk installation is causing.

Also keep in mind that most of the software used under Plesk is great software, they have just butchered the **** out of it to make it work. I look at Plesk as a simple way for me to make domains and add users. Everything else I handle at the command line. But since I don't run things like they want them to run, I really don't do that much command line work.

 

[hgmichna]

I was getting emails coming through to Outlook/Thunderbird etc totally unparsed. The headers were in the email and all HTML code was showing, instead of a nice pretty email.

Disabling the SPF fixed it. Thank you!!

Same here too, even though I had disabled SPF blocking. I had to disable SPF altogether.

Meanwhile I've received many complaints from my users. This is painful and embarrassing.