Exim and Exim-26 Failed

[rando]

Yeah, there's something wrong with exim on 88 apparently. One of our admins is working on tracking down the problem right now.

[crazypenguin]

No kidding. After 25 emails and 4 days of contacting tech support you guys just figured it out.

[rando]

Like I said, we weren't in over the weekend. When we got in this morning, one of our admins immediately began working on it, and we think it's fixed.

As far as we can tell it was just a small DOS attack specifically targeted to exim. Exim was running, but it was timing out and none of the weekend guys could figure it out, so they just kept restarting it.

I think it may have been the same guy who caused our mail to go slowly last week, but there's no way to be sure because it's not the same IPs. He was also on box88, though, and if your "4 days" estimate is right, that places these attacks starting right when we killed his superspam.

[crazypenguin]

Cpanel shows exim is dead but I can send email notifications from the forum which makes it functional.

Now cpanel shows httpd dead.

http://www.crazypenguin.us/images/alienchaos18.png

[crazypenguin]

httpd is up again now.

http://www.crazypenguin.us/images/alienchaos19.png

[rando]

That cpanel lights thing is often inaccurate, was your site actually down during that period? I was able to make http connections just fine when I tested.

We've been having a lot of DOS attacks on that machine the last little bit from someone who has a bunch of different IPs at his disposal. Steve's been logging in and manually banning them, and our new admin has now rolled out a utility that will autoban people who have a lot of open connections to our servers, which should hopefully ease the issues you've been seeing.

I know for a fact that exim has been actually running the entire time this morning, so I would just chalk that one up to cpanel being stupid and lying to you about it.

[crazypenguin]

Cpanel shows exim as dead and email notifications are still not being sent from the forum.

http://www.crazypenguin.us/images/alienchaos20.png

You can dance around this issue all you want but the bottom line is I don't have a functional website. Another words I am not getting my money's worth for the value paid to Bluehost. Blue has been a highly unreliable web hosting company for my needs. I only have the one forum program runnning on the box 88 and it doesn't work for me due to Exim not being able to send email notifications to the forum members.

[rando]

Cpanel shows exim as dead and email notifications are still not being sent from the forum.

http://www.crazypenguin.us/images/alienchaos20.png

You can dance around this issue all you want but the bottom line is I don't have a functional website. Another words I am not getting my money's worth for the value paid to Bluehost. Blue has been a highly unreliable web hosting company for my needs. I only have the one forum program runnning on the box 88 and it doesn't work for me due to Exim not being able to send email notifications to the forum members.

Is this still happening? Can you replicated exim being down with telnet in a DOS command prompt? Run this command:

telnet box88.bluehost.com 25

When I try this from my home machine, every time you've asked about it, I can get in:

Trying 70.103.189.88...
Connected to box88.bluehost.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220-box88.bluehost.com ESMTP Exim 4.52 #1 Tue, 14 Mar 2006 18:03:59 -0700 
220-We do not authorize the use of this system to transport unsolicited, 
220 and/or bulk e-mail.

[crazypenguin]

I can get in fine by telnet.

http://www.crazypenguin.us/images/alienchaos21.png

The forum still will not send email notificatons. I have the same software installed on box 67 and 70 and both run with no problems. The program ran fine on box 88 until the exim errors appeared in cpanel.
Whether exim is running and functioning properly are two different issues.
If Exim is not functional it is good as dead.

[rando]

The forum still will not send email notificatons. I have the same software installed on box 67 and 70 and both run with no problems. The program ran fine on box 88 until the exim errors appeared in cpanel.
Whether exim is running and functioning properly are two different issues.
If Exim is not functional it is good as dead.

I don't think it is an exim issue. There have been no attempts to send out an email from you that I can see, but what email address are these supposed to be coming from?

Other emails are going out all the time, and nobody else has reported any email issues on box88 at all the last few days.

I'm not saying there isn't a problem, I'm just trying to get more information out of you so I can at least try to replicate it tomorrow when I get into work.