Thanks very much, Rolf! I have set Mercury to run as a service and will wait for the next restart to see if it functions as expected.
Hi, all:
We are using Mercury/32 4.74 in an environment serving mail to a variety of clients: desktop (Pegasus & Outlook) and mobile (iPhone & K9 Mail). Everything works fine until Mercury/32 restarts (using Loader.exe) and then suddenly the mobile users cannot send mail until I re-load the self-signed certificate (Configuration, SMTP Server, SSL, Server certificate). I don't remember it always being like this, I would say it was working fine before had to reinstall Mercury some time ago, possibly when I moved it to a new server. I did create a new certificate at that time, but I don't pretend to know a lot about certificates. It would seem that the certificate is good, just that for some reason Mercury/32 isn't loading it at startup. Loading it is not hard to do, but I don't hear about the problem until people suddenly can't send email on their phones, and they are not happy about it. Is there a way to get Mercury/32 to auto-load the certificate? Let me know if I need to supply any more information on my setup, and thanks in advance for your help!
-=Glen Jackson
Assuming that the certificate information has been successfully saved to mercury.ini the certificate will automatically be used by Mercury. Open mercury.ini in Notepad to verify that there is a line starting with SSL_Certfile and containing the correct filename for the certificate.
/Rolf
Hi, Rolf... thanks for your help! Indeed the certificate file is listed in the [MercuryS] section of the INI file, and both the path and filename are correct. Could some other setting prevent the certificate from being loaded?
-=Glen
If the certificate file is present in mercury.ini it should make no difference if it has been accessed from the configuration dialog or not, the program should find it anyhow. To eliminate any problem with the path, give the file a really simple name ("my.cert" or something like that) and put it in the main Mercury folder.
/Rolf
Hi, Rolf:
I did as you advised and renamed the certificate to a short name (my.cert) and loaded it into Mercury. The certificate was already stored in the main Mercury folder. I did this last week and Mercury has been stable since then, but just now I noticed it crashed, and sure enough it did not load the certificate when Loader re-launched Mercury. As a further test, I manually closed down and launched Mercury.exe, and this time the certificate loaded! So it would seem there is a problem with the Loader. Can anyone confirm this, and point me in the direction of a workaround?
Edit: Note that my Loader.exe is v4.72, but I am using Mercury v4.74. Is this correct?
-=Glen
*Bump*
Just happened again, it's not so inconvenient now because I can quickly re-load the certificate file while at the office, but I plan on taking a vacation in a couple weeks and don't want to have to babysit the mail server. At this point I'm fairly sure it's a failure in the Loader program to tell Mercury to load the certificate, or something wrong with Mercury such that it doesn't load the certificate when launched from Loader. Is this something that can be fixed?
-=Glen
The version of Loader.exe is still 4.72. Loader will however just start Mercury.exe, it doesn't do anything beyond that. The only thing I can think of is that the certificate file for some reason is locked by the filesystem at restart and can't be opened, but I have no idea what could cause that.
/Rolf
I can't think of any reason why it would not load properly either. There is no antivirus running on that machine. I have checked the Event Logs and they do not have any indication of a problem. The entries below are the latest from Loader.log:
--------------------------------------------------
12-09-11.0939: Mercury/32 Loader Started
12-09-12.0937: Restarting Mercury after apparent abnormal termination
12-09-12.0940: Normal operation restored - resetting counters.
12-09-12.1514: Restarting Mercury after apparent abnormal termination
12-09-12.1540: Normal operation restored - resetting counters.
12-09-18.1046: Restarting Mercury after apparent abnormal termination
12-09-18.1143: Normal operation restored - resetting counters.
12-09-24.0825: Restarting Mercury after apparent abnormal termination
12-09-24.0847: Normal operation restored - resetting counters.
12-09-24.0932: Restarting Mercury after apparent abnormal termination
12-09-24.0947: Normal operation restored - resetting counters.
---------------------------------------------
Is there any place else I can check that might help me narrow down the cause of the certificate file not getting loaded? Does Loader.exe have a commandline switch that might invoke a slight delay in the launch that might give the file system time to catch up? Is there an alternate to using Loader.exe that might serve the same purpose and not have this problem? This is a fully licensed instance of Mercury and I would prefer to keep using it, but I need to have it in a state that does not require constant monitoring.
-=Glen
One alternative would be to run Mercury as service, and set the service to automatically restart in case it goes down. Note though that if using a newer version of Windows (Vista or later) there are issues with accessing the console window when running as a service (due to session 0 isolation). Mercury v5 will use a different approach to avoid that problem.
/Rolf
