Publishing site kills ftp server

[southonet]

Hello,

I'm really stumped on this problem. I'm trying to publish a site and sitebuilder is erroring with "The site cannot be published to the specified location. Cannot connect to the host via FTP." The simplest explanation is that sitebuilder is exceeding the connection limit in xinetd when connecting. For what reason I can't identify. Anyone experienced this before? I turned up the logging verbosity and I get the following when trying to publish.

System 8/12/2008 4:40:11 PM admin Show view /Admin/Site/Edit
System 8/12/2008 4:40:11 PM admin Must be moved via redirect
System 8/12/2008 4:40:11 PM admin Action status: 2; Target: /Admin/Site/Edit?siteId=e08acfdf33672cd6923367c6fb3a717b; Messages: The site cannot be published to the specified location.
System 8/12/2008 4:40:11 PM admin Checking target finished....
System 8/12/2008 4:40:11 PM admin Can't connect to the host 'xxx.xx.xxx.xxx'...
System 8/12/2008 4:39:25 PM admin Publication settings checked....
System 8/12/2008 4:39:25 PM admin Publication settings are valid....
System 8/12/2008 4:39:25 PM admin Checking target started....
System 8/12/2008 4:39:25 PM admin Try to execute action /Admin/Site/Publish

 

[Dmitry Frantsev]

I can suggest you to check FTP logs on publishing server. From the output below I can see that publication settings are checked and valid but for some reasons publication can not be done. Most probably this is related to FTP server or something else.
I can also suggest you to update Sitebuilder to latest 4.2.3 version if you still use old 4.0 release. There were done a lot of fixes and improvements in new version so upgrade is recommended. For more information how to make an upgrade please refer to documentation http://download1.parallels.com/SiteBuilder/4.2.0/doc/install/en_US/html/index.htm

 

[southonet]

Thanks Dmitry,
Some more info on this...The site that is failing to publish is one of a few subdomains for the same username in plesk. I'm not at all sure why but this user can publish his first sitebuilder site to ..subdomains/domain.tld/httpdocs and this new creation just fails miserably when trying to publish to another subdomain. I hesitate to update SB until I have assurance it will resolve this problem since other sites publish without errors and serveral users are dependant on SB.

There's nothing referencing this domain in the ftp logs as if the connection is never completed. I get plenty of messages to syslog though as SB will open too many ( set to 45) connections per second until xinetd closes down the ftp service.

Aug 13 09:58:21 dpsa1 proftpd[3177]: dpsa1.southo.net (xxx.xx.xxx.xx[xxx.xx.xxx.xx]) - FTP session opened.
Aug 13 09:58:21 dpsa1 proftpd(pam_unix)[3177]: session opened for user isaacs by (uid=0)
Aug 13 09:58:21 dpsa1 xinetd[2277]: Deactivating service ftp due to excessive incoming connections. Restarting in 30 seconds.

 

[Dmitry Frantsev]

Please check following article and try to apply solution described there: http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/275357.htm. By the way, can you see any error messages in /var/log/messages ? Just try to increase more number of connections for xinetd service.
It looks like situation not related to Sitebuilder itself as rest of the sites work fine and error messages indicates that FTP service is deactivated periodically.

 

[southonet]

I tried your suggestion of increasing the permitted cps prior to creating this thread. I increased the xinetd connections per second from 25 to 45. But, sitebuilder will keep opening connections until xinetd shuts down the ftpd. The lines I posted earlier were from /var/log/messages. I would agree with you on the problem not being related to sitebuilder if I could reproduce the problem some other way but, no matter what test I run, I cannot. We've also never had a sitebuilder user trying to publish to more than one of their subdomains in plesk so perhaps it's related somehow. Very tricky problem for us. Thanks

 

[southonet]

Problem solved. The problem was the path sitebuilder was attempting to publishing to did not exist. I verified the ftp users path to the home directory and found I only needed to enter "httpdocs" in this case. This happens when you create a new FTP user for the subdomain. The new subdomain ftp user's home dir path is /home/vhosts/domain.tld/subdomains/<subdomain>. My user was confused since to publish the first subdomain they had to publish to subdomains/<subdomain>/httpdocs becuase they opted not to create a new ftp user during subdomain creation. Hope this helps someone.

 

[Dmitry Frantsev]

Thanks' for the feedback. Glad that situation is resolved now. It is strange that Sitebuilder log said that publication settings were fine: "Publication settings are valid...." from your first message. In case of incorrect path, it should output corresponding message.