Re: Typical host setup

When you moved servers, did you by chance move to a fedora based system? If so, it is possible that Selinux is active on that system. If so, you might have some crazy contexts on your cgi scripts that are valid with selinux.

Just a thought

~ Gavin

Susan Barnes wrote:
Farm Woman schrieb:
Thank you for the suggestions.

This situation was a minor problem since we set up on the 7th of last
month (when it would SOMETIMES not work) and became a major problem a
little over a week ago, when NOTHING was getting through - I've been in
constant communication with Network Solutions tech support all this
time - I can't touch or look at anything on their system but our
company's scripts and html files, so we couldn't do anything about it
ourselves (if our company gets much bigger, maybe it would be a good
idea for us to invest in our own server).

It wasn't email, since normal messages were getting through. There's
no spam blockers at this end, so that can't be it - we go through the
titles of all the emails, so we won't dump a customer's email by
accident. Also, at the suggestion of their tech support, I set up
several recipients on different servers (including THEIR OWN server) to
get the generated email, and none of them got through... it would be
extremely weird for them to blacklist themselves. Network Solutions
didn't give us access to the sendmail log, so I have no idea what
errors were generated... their tech support claims there were no
errors. One tech finally called me back yesterday and explained that
they have some sort of "anti-spam" thing running on their server that
won't allow sendmail generated mail out unless the original cgi script
has the line "$from = 'someone@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx';" added to the code.
Sounded wonky to us, but we tried it and it didn't work. I know the
forms were working because they would do everything they're supposed to
do except send the mail and they actually worked for a while, before
they just quit completely, and we would be getting money from Paypal
for orders we never received (with fields filled out the way our copy
or Perlshop fills them) and calls from customers wanting to know why we
never sent out their orders. After several days of blaming our forms,
NWS's tech support finally admitted that there was nothing wrong with
them. That's why I was convinced there's some setting on NWS's copy
of sendmail that needs to be set to allow it to work, but their tech
support says I'm wrong... maybe it's a supplementary piece of
software, but the new server we've switched to, GoDaddy, does have such
a limit on the number of sendmail messages we can generate - fine by
us, we don't want to send spam, we just want to get our orders! :)


Sendmail normally logs every attempt to send mail. If your application manages to invoke sendmail, you could see where things go wrong in the maillog.


If tech support sees no errors in the maillog:


Maybe your CGI is not invoking sendmail properly and not noticing (and not logging) the failure.

NWS uses some weird anti-spam-configuration, that throws away mails (sendmail does not loose mails, but if you explicitly tell it to drop them it will do so.)

There are problems with the queue-runner processing the submission queue.
There is a seperate mailqueue for mails, that have been passed to the submission program but have not been handed over to the daemon yet. If this queue is not processed properly, this can stay unnoticed for a while, because it will affect only mail generated locally (and only the part, which could not be delivered the first time round).
In this case you would find mail sitting around in /var/spool/clientmqueue waiting for delivery.



Regards
Susan
.

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