Smartermail service failing ....

Question asked by Steve Gaston - 4/2/2024 at 11:56 PM

Answered

Anyone seen such issue lately. I think this issue first cropped up after we upgraded to the release candidate to do with .NET changes.

This is what happens, I either receive a phone call from a client or I spot it myself. The server the software is hosted in is running no problem, all resources on the server are running no problems.

However Smartermail is out of action. When trying to access the GUI an error is thrown that the resource is not available. I have to restart the Smartermail service and then it comes back online.

Looking at the server logs I see four event system messages appear shortly after the Smartermail service stops responding

Source: IIS-IISReset

"IIS stop command received from user NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM"

I looked into the Smartermail logs but could not find anything that will assist me in tracking down the issue.

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Tim Uzzanti Replied

4/3/2024 at 7:41 AM

Employee Post Marked As Answer

Sounds it might be more system related but we can take a look. Contact our support team and we help you diagnose.

Tim Uzzanti CEO SmarterTools Inc. (877) 357-6278 www.smartertools.com

Steve Gaston Replied

4/3/2024 at 9:58 PM

Thank you Tim for reaching out.

Ive updated Smartermail to the latest release and it looks to have resolved the issue documented

https://portal.smartertools.com/community/a95866/the-page-cannot-be-displayed-because-an-internal-server-error-has-occurred_.aspx#144462

I am going to guess that the issue described in the the above link is associated with the .NET changes, so will wait to see if the new version of Smartermail has resolved the issue described in the thread

Thanks

Michael Replied

4/4/2024 at 9:34 PM

We're seeing issue where we install SmarterMail update. Installer popup says we'll need to restart after the update. Usually get 2 pop ups saying same. Click OK to both. Then says update successful. Then we restart the server. When server comes back the SmarterMail service is not started. We have to start it manually. It's been this way last 3 updates or so. Including update today. Going to dig around event viewer logs a bit and open a ticket.

Gabriele Maoret - SERSIS Replied

4/4/2024 at 11:35 PM

When we have to upgrade, we usually uninstall SmarterMail first, then reboot, then install the new build.

This seems to work flawless for us

Gabriele Maoret - Head of SysAdmins at SERSIS Currently manages 6 SmarterMail installations (1 in the cloud for SERSIS which provides services to a few hundred third-party email domains + 5 on-premise for customers who prefer to have their mail server in-house)

Sébastien Riccio Replied

4/5/2024 at 7:43 AM

That's a long time we did not try to upgrade SM without stopping it first and being sure it's stopped, per this I mean the mailservice.exe process MUST be gone from the process list running on the machine.

This because we noticed that when stopping the service it takes a few minutes before it's really gone, even that the service manager says it is stopped.

It might be that during an upgrade, the installer will stop the service and go on with the install as soon as the service manager returns the service in stopped state, when in reality it's not yet fully stopped.

As long as the process is running, it is locking the application files so the installer might want you to restart as it might not be able to overwrite some files during the upgrade.

It probably depends on how large your installation is though.

Sébastien Riccio System & Network Admin https://swisscenter.com

Jay Dubb Replied

4/6/2024 at 9:24 AM

+1 for what Sebastien said. It takes about 2 minutes on our server for the mailservice.exe process to disappear from Task Manager after stopping the service. The Services applet in Windows indicates the service has been stopped successfully, but in reality it continues running while it bleeds off connections and exits out of RAM.

In fact, we don't even reboot the server without manually stopping the SM process and waiting for mailservice.exe to disappear from Task Manager. We learned the hard way that rebooting while SM is still in memory corrupts files and we had a circumstance where several hundred email boxes failed to load after a reboot due to file corruption in each of the affected accounts.

Michael Replied

4/8/2024 at 11:23 AM

We're going to try a SmarterMail re-install tonight following guidance above of stopping service. Uninstalling. Then re-installing.

Today our server reboot due to issues at the data center. When it restarted, SmarterMail was stopped.

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