Problem with Vbulletin

greaseman

Verified User
Joined
Sep 20, 2003
Messages
8
ok of course you know vbulletin has 2 versions right now 2.3.3 and 3.0 beta 7 with the next release due out this week for template upgrades. well anyway i am running the beta 7 version
on old server it ran excellent without a problem. now since putting this site on its own server with DA of course it seems that this version and exim doesnt get along to well. for example when you send out mail to users at times it will send out multiples and i mean that in a bad way like 8-25 of same mail to same person. then u multiply that by 11k+ and you got a heck of a mess and one giant bottle neck is then created on server. any suggestions ?????
i havent asked this question over at VB yet as i wasnt sure if maybe someone here may have had same problem.
thanks rob
 
Are you sure this problem is related to DirectAdmin, if your using a beta version you should expect problems that have not been mentioned or at minimum not been noticed much. Do not forget VB3 beta is new software and will still be buggy. I suggest you setup a stable version of VB and try sending emails out again to see if the problem persists.

Chris
 
Well, i know that the other version (non beta) works fine with DA, as we have a few clients with it, and there is the fact these forums are on a DA box as well :p

Try the non beta, then take a look at your exim config?
 
I honestly cant see the need to check your exim config, aslong as your normal mail works fine it *appears* the problem is more than likely being cuased by the vb system.

Chris
 
ur right is does appear to be a conflict with the new version and exim. we are looking at anything that may be causing this.
i also have a few other forums includeing the RC version and phpbb running on server. they seem to be ok but now keep in mind they arent sending out 11k mails either.
from what i can tell it looks like some of the mail is getting stuck in outbound cue. Now with that in mind Vb will resend thinking it hasnt sent the mail and of course theres the problem with multiples. then of course it creates the bottle neck, loads the server up and it panics. dont get me wrong DA is the BEST, exim just isnt a strong point.
the reason im askin now and tryin to fix is i have another forum that is coming onboard with better than 40 k members and if it doesnt work for me its not going to work for them.


Ok anyway ill keep checkin into this as RC version for vb beta will be out soon. and since 2.3.3 wont be updated after that it could be a problem for larger sites
 
running 40k members you want a stable forum, not a buggy forum thats being tested. Until VB release a stable 3, quite simple i suggest you stick with a stable version.

Chris
 
ok did some more research
i asked around tryin to find a solution to this problem.
got a couple of folks telling me that with a default RH install of exim they are not having any problems sending mail to as many as 150k members using the beta version since all the php is already finshed and will be part of the final release.
So that brings me back to this. i know exim is installed with DA so my question is now is the conf the same as with a default RH install if not then maybe that s where im having problems.

the only reason i keep coming back to exim is that i know 100's of Vbulletin users on production servers using exim with alot more members than i have and not having a single problem with the beta.
 
Hmm, that's odd. For outgoing email, the exim.conf doesn't do a whole lot.. it's mainly for incoming mail. For outgoing, it just makes sure that the domain isn't a localdomain, then it gets the MX record and out goes the email. I'm not sure what's up, if it's an exim issue or not.

John
 
I have no idea how vBulliten is sending mail, but there should be no reason for vBulletin to send the message again, unless the call to 'sendmail' returned an error, and that is assuming they are calling sendmail directly, instead of using the php mail() function.

You should have a look at your /var/log/exim/* files to see if there are any errors happening. Also, you may want to find the php code in vBulletin that sends the emails and add some debug code to find out why it may be calling it multiple times.

Another thing just occured to me, and that is the your MySQL database could be corrupt. If the results from the SELECT statement is looping, then they could easily get multiple messages. You could find the sql SELECT statement and make sure that is correct, then look at the while loop where the mysql_fetch statment is to make sure that there isn't any looping.

This is how I would try to figure out the problem. As DA-Support said, outgoing mail is not that complicated. There has to be something else happening to cause the problem.
 
just an update!!! we are trying a few things to see if we can correct problem. i got a exim.conf file from one of the developers at Vbulletin off their clean redhat install and found that there is a major differance between it and the default DA installed one.

as soon as problem is solved i will post and let you know exactly what was causeing the problem.
 
I would try their exim.conf, but then that might (most likely) break email for all your virtual hosts. It would would at least prove if it is exim or something else causing the problem.
 
Did you ever figure this out? If you did, it is always a good idea to post what the problem ended up being. That way if someone else around here hits the same problem, a quick search of the forum will give them the answer.
 
still playin with it got a few minor details yet to work out but so far so good.
from what we can tell when DA was installed (now correct me if im wrong in this matter) it was orginally exim 3 whatever and somewhere along the way it was updated to 4. ok now after doing alot of reading there were some problems with the update from 3 to 4 and exim recomended that 3 be uninstalled and 4 installed. with that being said with the use of vBulletin ( yes it uses php's mail function) if we sent out large chucks of mail (500 or more per cycle) the mail que was filling up and it would error causeing the mail in que and mail from next cycle to go into a loop.(problem fixed with uninstall of exim and install of lastest version)
So we figured out why it was causing server to panic, but we still had the problem with the mail being duplicated!!! well from what we can tell the update was also the problem there too. not sure why or how but it as well was solved with the fresh updated install.
Please keep in mind this only happened when sending out mass mail to memebers! normal mails operations worked fine.

also i stated in earlier post that i had gotten a exim conf from someone at VB it was a clean install on RH 9 version 4.21 i think
it was never updated from any other version.
i hope that helps to clarify the problem we were having. still a few questions as to exactly what was causing but at least its solved for the most part
 
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