Tag Archives: plesk

Fixing Plesk Postix sending emails locally

I had this issue too. Any email being sent to my company domain was being sent locally. This is (I believe) because in Plesk (yes it’s a Plesk issue).

So basically it’s going oh soandso@company.com is the registered user lets send any @company.com emails locally or something like that.

Anyway, I have had to fix this twice now and I did it by editing the /etc/postfix/main.cf file and commenting out the lines that started with “virtual”.

Posted in Plesk. Tagged with , .

Block failure notice emails in qmail

I have Plesk on my Linux server and I receive lots of spam emails from the root account on my server.
Here’s what happened. My forum used to send emails to non-existent email accounts around the web and I used to receive the failure notices for them.
To block failure notice emails in qmail that were forwarded to my main email I had to modify the aliases from

/var/qmail/alias

Here’s a sample email I received:

MAILER-DAEMON@nixware.net
Mar 30 (7 days ago)

to postmaster 
Hi. This is the qmail-send program at nixware.net.
I tried to deliver a bounce message to this address, but the bounce bounced!

:
2a00:1450:4013:0c01:0000:0000:0000:001a does not like recipient.
Remote host said: 550-5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist. Please try
550-5.1.1 double-checking the recipient's email address for typos or
550-5.1.1 unnecessary spaces. Learn more at
550 5.1.1 http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?answer=6596 q5si14669450wjx.9 - gsmtp
Giving up on 2a00:1450:4013:0c01:0000:0000:0000:001a.

--- Below this line is the original bounce.

Return-Path: <>
Received: (qmail 8634 invoked for bounce); 29 Mar 2015 23:50:02 +0200
Date: 29 Mar 2015 23:50:02 +0200
From: MAILER-DAEMON@nixware.net
To: root@nixware.net
Subject: failure notice

As you can see, the postmaster account was receiving the spam from MAILER-DAEMON and MAILER-DAEMON was forwarding them to my gmail.com account. Pretty nasty…

The fix:
Go to

/var/qmail/alias

do a

ls -alh

and you will see a couple of hidden config files.

Inside each of those file I had my @gmail account. With the next script I overwrote the gmail account with a non-existent email:

 

 

for FILE in ./.qmail-*;do echo "nonexistent@nodomain.tld" > $FILE;done

Restart/reload qmail:

service qmail reload

That’s it! You should not receive any spam from any of the root, mailman or postmaster accounts.

Posted in BASH, Plesk, scripts. Tagged with , , , , , .

How to fix Plesk mysql Fatal Exception

Today I received the following error when I was trying to use one of my forums and the server load was huge: 192.

It seems that there were too many connections towards the mysql server.

"ERROR: PleskFatalException Unable to connect to database: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Too many connections"

 

The number of connections can be checked with this command:

[root@nyx ~]# mysqladmin -uadmin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow` extended-status | grep Max_used_connections
| Max_used_connections | 127 |
[root@nyx ~]#

I checked the Plesk Mysqld configuration and I had:

set-variable=max_connections=100
set-variable=max_user_connections=0 ##this is a bad idea because there won't be any limit to the sql resources a connection can access

I modified the /etc/my.cnf file with a new limit to both max_connections and max_user_connections:

mysql connections

And the server load started decreasing dramatically from 190 to about 18. Still too high but it was a step forward.
Checked the /var/log/mysqld.log and found some errors, so yeah, the database needed some repairing to be done.

PS: the mysql process list can be viewed like this:

 

mysqladmin -uadmin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow` processlist | more

 

Posted in mysql, Plesk. Tagged with , , , , , .