First things first. I have never set up an email server before, including citadel. I just recently install a copy of citadel on a VirtualBox on my server. How can I verify it is sending and receiving emails appropriately? I sent one to my gmail and one to my yahoo and got the following errors.

mygmail.com 550 (550-5.7.26 This mail has been blocked because the sender is unauthenticated.)

myyahoo.com 553 (553 5.7.2 [TSS09] All messages from 71.64.132.66 will be permanently deferred; Retrying will NOT succeed. See https://postmaster.yahooinc.com/error-codes )

At least it sending. I have clearly sent outgoing mail but neither yahoo or gmail like my email setup. How can I fix this so they will accept my emails?

I used my server key nad crt in place of the citadel ones located in the /usr/local/citadel/keys/ directory. I changed the cert names to citadel.key and citadel.crt.

I tried to send email from both yahoo and gmail but received neither.

I have made a port forwarding list for the VB allowing all of the ports listed in the citadel administration screen access. It is possible my firewall is blocking. It’s a ubuntu server. Also, I have a Sonicwall on the frontend of my network.

That is one reason i stopped self hosting my mail. Decades ago people started blocking residential IP. Not everone but enough to make it problematic for me then. I'm sure its only got worse. 

Thu Oct 05 2023 18:02:27 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar Subject: Re: New Setup Issues by a Newbie

It's also possible that both gmail and yahoo simply reject mail originating from residential address blocks such as the one you are using on Charter Cable.

Thu Oct 05 2023 18:02:27 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar Subject: Re: New Setup Issues by a Newbie

There's not enough information to troubleshoot. At the very least you should show us your DNS configuration, identify the domain you're trying to use, show that the MX and RDNS records are correct; and show the configuration settings of your Citadel installation.

It'
s also possible that both gmail and yahoo simply reject mail originating from residential address blocks such as the one you are using on Charter Cable.
If that is the case, and you are serious about hosting a "real" Internet server from your home, you might consider a service such as https://www.aceinnovative.com/internet-access/static-ip-vpn/ to place your server on a "real" hosting network with static IP and no port restrictions. (This is not sponsored -- I and other Citadel operators are very happy customers.)

It is residential but it  is business class internet. I  had  static IP but  got of rid of it but will get it back tomorrow. Its a a real  server 88threads, etc. I'm not trying to host a public email server. I really just need it to  receive  emails  from yahoo, google etc. I don't need to  send  them. 

Again, the email server thing is new to me. I have citadel on a box on  my  server  behind a reverse  proxy. My domain  name I want to use  for  this is companalyticscloud.net. Can you look at the DNS information from it? I can open and close ports as needed.

Thanks for any help getting  me  started  on  this.

 

Thu Oct 05 2023 18:02:27 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar Subject: Re: New Setup Issues by a Newbie

There's not enough information to troubleshoot. At the very least you should show us your DNS configuration, identify the domain you're trying to use, show that the MX and RDNS records are correct; and show the configuration settings of your Citadel installation.

It'
s also possible that both gmail and yahoo simply reject mail originating from residential address blocks such as the one you are using on Charter Cable.
If that is the case, and you are serious about hosting a "real" Internet server from your home, you might consider a service such as https://www.aceinnovative.com/internet-access/static-ip-vpn/ to place your server on a "real" hosting network with static IP and no port restrictions. (This is not sponsored -- I and other Citadel operators are very happy customers.)

It is residential but it  is business class internet. I  had  static IP but  got of rid of it but will get it back tomorrow. Its a a real  server 88threads, etc. I'm not trying to host a public email server. I really just need it to  receive  emails  from yahoo, google etc. I don't need to  send  them. 

Again, the email server thing is new to me. I have citadel on a box on  my  server  behind a reverse  proxy. My domain  name I want to use  for  this is companalyticscloud.net. Can you look at the DNS information from it? I can open and close ports as needed.

 

 

Thanks for any help getting  me  started  on  this.

Just updated my Citadel to 996 and ....

citserver 38182 - - msgbase: message #8836 was not found
citserver 38182 - - msgbase: message #8837 was not found
citserver 38182 - - msgbase: message #8838 was not found
citserver 38182 - - msgbase: message #8839 was not found
citserver 38182 - - msgbase: message #8841 was not found
citserver 38182 - - msgbase: message #8842 was not found
citserver 38182 - - msgbase: message #8844 was not found
citserver 38182 - - msgbase: message #8845 was not found
citserver 38182 - - msgbase: message #8847 was not found
citserver 38182 - - msgbase: message #8848 was not found

Plus loads moar.  I tried using the database_cleanup.sh and I still get this issue.

The broken messages aren't in a room.  They're in the Outbound SMTP Queue.

Mon Oct 09 2023 13:52:33 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

It's possible that during some previous event those messages were deleted but one or more rooms still has pointers to them. In the new database code this should theoretically never happen, but if you still have those pointers to messages that don't exist, no amount of database cleanup will make the warnings go away.

If you can figure out what room they are in, you can safely delete them.

To be clear: anyone who is running Citadel 993 or later should almost never have any need to run the database_cleanup script. I spent my whole summer making the database_bdb module bullet proof, and would be quite surprised if anyone ever had that kind of corruption again.

Now if you're *really* picky and have a lot of time to kill, you could run `ctdldump` and edit the dump by hand, and then `ctdlload` it back into a fresh database. But you've probably got better ways to spend your time.

I'm attempting to upgrade our Citadel instance from version 958 to 996, using easyinstall (it was originally built using easyinstall).

The server is a 6-core, 12 thread I5-10400 with 64GB of RAM and NVMe disk, running Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS 6.2.0-34-generic kernel.

The database size is 5.5GB, but has never had any issues. The server logs look clean; starting with 'citserver -x9' doesn't show any obvious problems.

But the update attempt always gets stuck (until I kill it after an hour) at:

Restarting Citadel server to apply changes

[************************************************************************....]

using 100% of one CPU core, but not generating disk I/O. So it's obviously getting stuck near the end of citadel/utils/setup.c

An strace on the setup process shows continual attempts of:

read(-1, 0x7ffcca70371f, 1)             = -1 EBADF (Bad file descriptor)

(the read address changes from run to run)

Is this a repeated socket read attempt?

To proceed I have to kill the setup process and restore from backup.

Suggestions for how to diagnose further will be gratefully received...

I did try this once, on Sunday 1 October.

I stopped Citadel at 6:05pm and took a backup (tar -I pigz -cf /Backups/Citadel_bkp.tgz  etc/fetchmailrc  usr/local/citadel  usr/local/webcit  usr/local/ctdlsupport ).

I did a full server reboot at 6:23pm, then ran the update - at 6:30pm /var/log/syslog showed Citadel server engine starting with Version 996 (build 23274) and Existing database version on disk is 958, so it did the Running pre-startup and post-startup database upgrades. This took about one minute, leaving the database in a shut down state.

After letting the update script itself sit hanging for an hour, I Ctrl-C'd the update, then manually started citadel (systemctl start citadel.service) at 7:36pm

/var/log/syslog showed Citadel server engine starting with Version 996 (build 23274) and Existing database version on disk is 996

Things initially appeared to be OK - I received a test email at 7:48pm.

Then our normal scheduled backup ran at 8:10pm, stopping and restarting citserver. /var/log/syslog recorded normal database shutdown and restart.

But on Monday morning the filesystem was full due to 5,113 x 10MB log.00000nnnnn files in /usr/local/citadel/data/ (filled at 2:20am, but no citserver messages in /var/log/mail.log).

So I had to rollback to Saturday evening's backup taken immediately before I attempted the update.

Hello,

I'm trying to setup citadel so that it works perfectly on a new box, Debian 12, but everytime i want to create a new room and setup the mailing list in order to have abuse@ or postmaster@ or admin@ or any other universal id such as hostmaster@ of a domain, the server simply refuses to save or adds ackward special characters to the domain name such as "%2%" and so on.

Do you know if there's a problem with debian 12 or am i doing something wrong?

I installed the server with the easy install script and there where some warnings but not errors.

Best Regards,

Niko

I think the issue might be the hyphen " - " from the domain name.

Can anybody please tell me if citadel has issues with domain names that contain hyphens?

BR,

Niko

Okay so basically I just need to start fresh with a new database.  This thing is so borked there is no recovering it.

Where can I find the log files (or is it possible to make citadel/webcit log to syslog)?

Could be if youre trying to authenticate with an active directory server and either you cant reach it,  dont have the admin user created on the AD server, or something of the sort.