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If you upgrade to 8.1 and your SMTP auth breaks, this may be why...

H

Hostasaurus@

Guest
Upgraded two servers to 8.1 from 7.5 and 8.0 yesterday and smtp authentication immediately stopped working. The symptoms were users would try to connect, they'd pass the correct information and it would reject them anyway. SWSoft's support was 100% useless, opened a high priority ticket, got one reply and now it's 24 hours later without any replies. Fortunately I enabled POP before SMTP as a workaround which got most customers sending without knowing there had been a problem and then with some Google searching, I found the forums of another hosting provider where they had notified their customers that SMTP auth was not working and then later notified them that it was resolved. On the off chance they used Plesk I contacted them and they did and were able to tell me exactly what the problem was and how to resolve it.

In my case, the servers in question both began life as RedHat Enterprise 3 and 4 respectively but were later converted to CentOS. Even through the various updates, this left the servers with the RedHat Enterprise versions of:

courier-imap
psa-logrotate
psa-passwd
psa-qmail-1.03
psa-qmail-rblsmtpd-0.70
SSHTerm-0.2.2

Apparently something about those versions doesn't allow smtp auth to work on servers that are now running CentOS, not sure what since they should be identical sans trademarks. So anyway, replacing those rpms with the centos versions resolved the issue without any side effects. SSHTerm is only in there because it did have a centos equivalent, obviously it wasn't related to this problem.

If you download the current distribution file you can extract it and get the rpms from it, then, if you're on CentOS 3 for example, here's the command you run from the base distribution directory to fix this:

rpm -Uvh --force ./dist-rpm-CentOS-3.6-i386/base/courier-imap-3.0.8-centos3.6.build81061129.22.i586.rpm ./dist-rpm-CentOS-3.6-i386/base/psa-logrotate-3.7-centos3.6.build81061129.22.i586.rpm ./dist-rpm-CentOS-3.6-i386/opt/horde/psa-passwd-3.0-centos3.6.build81061129.22.noarch.rpm ./dist-rpm-CentOS-3.6-i386/base/psa-qmail-1.03-centos3.6.build81061129.22.i586.rpm ./dist-rpm-CentOS-3.6-i386/opt/mail/psa-qmail-rblsmtpd-0.70-centos3.6.build81061129.22.i586.rpm ./dist-rpm-CentOS-3.6-i386/opt/sshterm/SSHTerm-0.2.2-centos3.6.build81061129.22.noarch.rpm
 
Hostasaurus,

Thanks for informing people of the fix. Perhaps that was you on our live chat? :)
 
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