[ic] Unable to send mail / GPG errors cleared up after changing to Net::SMTP

[JT Justman]

Mike Heins wrote:
> Quoting JT Justman (jt at airdelights.com):
> 
>>Hi!
>>
>>Our catalog (IC 5.2.1, offline credit cards, HIGH traffic mode) had been
>>having more and more intermitent "Unable to send mail using
>>/usr/sbin/sendmail" errors and "PGP failed with error level 12, status
>>12" / "PGP hard failure" errors.
>>
>>First I applied the code from a patch that makes Order.pm retry three
>>times when doing encryption. The second try was always successful, but
>>the mail errors didn't change.
>>
>>Then I specified the use of Net::SMTP in catalog.cfg:
>>
>>SendMailProgram  Net::SMTP
>>Variable  MV_SMTPHOST  127.0.0.1
>>
>>Since then I have had zero mail errors and no need to retry on gpg. I
>>have several custom mail messages that go out for each order, and this
>>must have been the load that was slowing down gpg, rather than the other
>>way around.
>>
>>Just wanted to put that idea out there for the potential benefit of
>>anyone who may have experienced these errors. From reading the archives,
>>this situation might have be caused either as a result of having my temp
>>files on a RAID-1 volume, or of having simply reached the limit of HIGH
>>traffic mode; re-partitioning and switching to RPC are not easy to do on
>>a production server, and for the time being at least, Net::SMTP handles
>>the mail transactions efficiently enough to dodge that bullet.
> 
> 
> Good suggestion. Though I take issue with:
> 
> 
>>switching to RPC are not easy to do on a production server,
> 
> 
> It is extremely easy to do; just change the TRAFFIC variable 
> to rpc and away you go.
> 
> You might want to move to 5.4 prior to that, though, as it more reliably
> keeps track of processes. I also usually add:
> 
> 	ChildLife 30 minutes
> 
> on a busy server. Also, an occasional bludgeoning helps keep zombie
> servers away:
> 
>    killall interchange; sleep 2; killall \
> 	-KILL interchange; /usr/local/interchange/bin/restart
> 

Sure thing, Mike, and thanks for the tips. I've just been daunted by a
few stories of embedded Perl problems in RPC vs HIGH, and I want to test
things through on my test server before I make the move. I have very
many [perl] tags, ActionMaps, usertags, etc. to verify. I will probably
make that move in the next six months.

Thanks -

JT