IPM v9 - E-mail notifications working intermittently

Question

Hi there.  We installed IPM v9 (build 1236) a few months ago on a Windows Server 2003 and on the whole it is going well.  However the main method that we were going to use to alert us was to send e-mails to the appropriate support people.

After checking and cross-checking, the only time that IPM is sending an e-mail is when the server that is installed on is booted up.  When this happens an e-mail is successfully sent with the standard subject and body stating that 'The ipMonitor instance (<server_name>) has just started.'.  We have not been able to get IPM to send us e-mails in any other circumstances.

When have tried using the 'Force Test' open when setting up the e-mail alert action, but this fails with the message 'Action Error: The outbound alert message did not reach its destination.  Thes test failed.'.  We have even resorted to running Wireshark on the server to see whether there may be some sort of SMTP error that may help us.  The Wireshark captures that we performed suggest that when an alert is tripped, or when using the Force Test, no SMTP traffic was being sent from the server with IPM installed.

Has anyone else had this issue?  Is there some other debugging that we could do in Windows or IPM to try and determine what the error may be?

Thanks.

... Simon Evans

SimonEvans · Answer

Hi there...

For the record we have worked out what the issue was.  It was the Virus Scanner software on the ipMonitor server after all.  Hidden in the Access Protection task of the McAfee VirusScan Console was a rule that some how had been enabled.  The rule stopped the server from sending any traffic on port 25 (SMTP).  We can only think that there had been some Virus Scan update that the server received from the Virus Scan server which meant that the behaviour of the rules on the server changed about four weeks ago.

Thanks to the two guys who had suggestions on how to fix this issue.  Both of the responses helped in being able to diagnose the issue.

Regards,

... Simon

SimonEvans · Answer

Good suggestion from bleearg13.

The SMTP Server host can be pinged from the server.  This was something that I had not specifically tried, so it was good to confirm that there was no issue with this.  So this shows that there is at least some sort of network connectivity between ipMonitor and the SMTP Server host.

Performing a Telnet to port 25 on the SMTP Server host from the ipMonitor host is a great idea.  I had not thought of this.  Trying this from the ipMonitor host to the SMTP Server host was not successful.  As a result, it looks like there is definitely something blocking this traffic between the ipMonitor host and the SMTP Server host.  There are firewalls between the SMTP server and the ipMonitor host, so this is a good place to start asking some questions.

However this does not still seem to match with the observation that an e-mail is able to be sent through from the ipMonitor host when it is rebooted.

Regards,

... Simon

SimonEvans · Answer

Peter...

Thanks for the suggestion. I have given this a go and had no luck; no change.

Regards,

... Simon