SmtpClient.Send Exception - asp.net

My site sends confirmation emails from a purchase. 95% of the time, it works. The other 5% after clicking the 'Confirm' button that runs the payment and should send the email, i get the following exception:
Details:
Exception: Failure sending mail.
Inner Exception: Unable to connect to
the remote server
Inner Exception
(2): A connection attempt failed
because the connected party did not
properly respond after a period of
time, or established connection failed
because connected host has failed to
respond 72.167.234.197:25
The code to send the email is this:
Dim smtpClientPayPalSuccess As System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient = New System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient()
smtpClientPayPalSuccess.Host = "relay-hosting.secureserver.net"
smtpClientPayPalSuccess.Send(mailMessagePayPalSuccess)
FYI: I have confirmed with the hosting that I don't need any credentials, or a different port number than 25. This is also running over https.
Any idea why this would be happening only a small percentage of the time?
Thanks.
Dave

I don't know why the mail fails part of the time. As far as I know it could be scheduled maintenance of the firewalls or the mail server itself.
I would advise you to send the mail asynchronously, and not as part of the 'Confirm' button process. Just put the mail on a (persistent) store and keep trying to send it with some time in between.
Alternatively (and heartily recommended) is to send the mail from your app to a local mail server, and let that mail server forward the mail to 72.167.234.197:25. That way you get the retries for free and the chance that sending mail to localhost fails is quite small (or it should be small).

It is possible and quite likely based on your exposition, that there are actual network errors that prevent your site from connecting/communicating with the SMTP server. This could be the result of too much traffic, or maybe slow network connections. My recommendation would be to put a try/catch around the emailing code, and maybe retry sending the e-mail a few times before giving up.
When you mention that this is working 95% of the time it shows that the problem most likely lies outside of your control.
As a side note, you should maybe consider not giving up the actual IP address of your SMTP server (it is of no consequence to the question)

Related

what causes the data power object to goto pending state and how can it be resolved?

In datapower, the operational state of queue manager object is pending. The information provided for this operational state is as follows : "This message indicates that the configuration of the object has changed, but has not been committed and has yet to take effect. No user intervention is required." What is exactly causing this problem and how can this be resolved?
If it is "pending" for a MQ QM object it means that DataPower is trying to figure out if it has a connection to it or not.
Normally if a QM object is in "pending" for a while, more than 20 seconds, it would mean that it didn't get the connection.
Check the System log and you'll probably see a ton of connection errors to the QM server.
First go to Troubleshooting from the Control Panel and do a TCP test to make sure you have a connection to the MQ server using the IP and port of the listener on the QM.
If you get a connection then check the MQ logs for any authentication issues, eg. user and/or auth-records. You need a Server-Connection channel for DataPower!
If you don't get a connection in TCP test then check your firewalls and also make sure that the DataPower network is setup correctly if you have multiple network cards (NIC) setup and set a static route for the MQ on the correct NIC.

lost server replies/errors with netty's object decoder

I have a very simple netty app which serves both as server and a client.
Client uses channel.writeAndFlush() to send request to server and then blocks on monitor.wait().
In client's InboundAdapter in channelRead() I find the appropriate monitor and do monitor.notify() to let the requesting client thread to proceed working on the server's reply.
On the server in ChannelHandler's channelRead() I do the following:
To limit the amount of requests being processed I submit a task which does the real work as a new task to existing EventLoop: ctx.executor().submit(new Task()). I that task I do heavy IO operations and after that I writeAndFlush() results back to client.
Here is my pipeline setup:
new ObjectEncoder(),
new ObjectDecoder(LibConstants.Search.MAX_REQUIEST_SIZE, ClassResolvers.cacheDisabled(null))
Here is the bootstrap config:
new ServerBootstrap()
.channel(NioServerSocketChannel.class)
.option(ChannelOption.SO_BACKLOG, 1000)
.option(ChannelOption.SO_KEEPALIVE, true)
I have 2 problems:
Rather often I get io.netty.handler.codec.DecoderException: java.io.UTFDataFormatException on the client when receiving a reply from server. I cannot find any obvious reason for this. Since my pipeline setup is so simple.
A reply from the server just wouldn't appear on the client. I the logs I see a successful flush on the server but the reply never arrived at the client. This is very hard to deal with since my app is very latency sensitive. Any timeout I would set will kill my user experience.
This all happens over a VPN network so there is a possibility that VPN device misbehaves in some weird way but I hoping that TCP would handle any sort of packet loss/corruption which can happen in the channel.
Any advice or experience you can share will be very appreciated!

FMS server died daily while enable rtmfp

I have a fms 3 server runing a video chat room application. It goes well except everyday it will die once or twice. After restarting the fms server, everything goes working again.
I really need to know the reason why fms server can die.
I checked its log, i saw many
"Server rejected an invalid flow."
Any hint will be greatest welcome.
This error can be caused by making an attempt to make a P2P connection to the server's peer ID. Connections to the server need to use
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/845685
i believe the problem is that you are attempting to make a P2P connection to the server's peer ID; that is, something like
var ns:NetStream = new NetStream(netConnection, netConnection.farID);
ns.play(...);
under the covers, this will open a new RTMFP flow to the server that will appear to the server as a new incoming client, but the initial handshake will be incorrect (the first/only command message is "play" instead of "connect"). i see this on Cirrus all the time.
it's possible that FMS doesn't account properly when rejecting these flows (leaving the connection count higher than it should be), or perhaps it leaves the flow open waiting for a "connect" message that will never come, so the connection count is legitimately higher than you think it is.
in any case, make sure you're not opening a P2P stream to the server's peer ID.
However, this error may not actually be related to the crashes. Additionally, are you even sure FMS is crashing and not just your application? If it's just your application, review your application logs (instead of the core FMS logs) and if you don't have anything useful add more logging to your application.

TcpListener stops accepting or accepts broken connections

We currently experience a problem with a self-written server application running on Windows (occurs on different versions). The server listens at a TCP port, accepts connections, exchanges some data and then closes the connections again. There are about 100 clients that connect from time to time.
Sometimes the server stops to work: Log files show that connections are still accepted, but that at the first read attempt a socket error (10054 - Connection reset by peer) occurs. I don't think it is a client issue because it suddenly stops working for all clients.
Now we found out, that the same problem occurs with our old server software, that is even written in another programming language. So it doesn't seem to be an error in our program - I think it has to be some kind of OS / firewall issue? Of course, firewalls have been deactivated, which didn't solve the issue yet.
Any ideas where to look into? Wireshark logs will follow soon..
Excerpt from the log (Timestamp, Thread Id, message)
11:37:56.137 T#3960 Connection from 10.21.13.3
11:37:56.138 T#3960 Client Exception: Socket Error # 10054
Connection reset by peer.
11:37:56.138 T#3960 ClientDisconnected
11:38:00.294 T#4144 Connection from 10.21.13.3
You can see that the exception occurs almost at the same time as the connection is accepted, in this case the client reconnects after a few seconds.
A "stateful" firewall or NAT keeps track of connections, and ought to send RSTs for connectiosn it doesn't know about. If the firewall loses track of connections for some reason, then you'll probably see random connections being reset.
Our router at work does this — it forgets about connections when the PPP connection dies, which is remarkably unhelpful when it rains and the DSL restart takes a bit too long. However, instead of resetting connections, it just drops packets (even more unhelpful!).
Sounds like a firewall or routing issue - maybe stale connections get disconnected after a timeout period. Are you using a ping/keepalive inside your protocol.
Otherwise you may ask Wireshark to see what is going on.
First, thanks for many hints - I'm afraid the problem was a completely different one which you couldn't possibly solve by reading my question.
The server application uses log4net, configured with a log file an ImmediateFlush = true. If every log statement is directly written into the file and multiple socket connections occur this slows down the whole application.
The server needed about a minute to really accept the connection. This was far more than the timeout on clientside. So in the log there was only shown "accepted" followed by "disconnected" - even the log was delayed!
Sorry for the inconvenience...
Have you tried changing the backlog and then see how much time or how many clients are served before this problem occurs
You don't say what Windows versions you're using for the server, but you should be aware that the Windows TCP/IP stack behaves differently in server and client OSes. There are limits on how many simultaneous incoming connections a client OS will allow, and they are significantly lower than you might expect.
What do the logs look like from the client side?
Since the error is stating that the client is dropping the connection; if you see the same error on the client side then it is a firewall or proxy that is dropping the connection (both side seeing the opposite side dropping the connection is indicative of a proxy/firewall).
If the error is not present on the client side; then I would say that your client side is where you will see the actual error.

Delay before sending message over socket - how does that help?

I have a tcpip socket interface to a third party software app. I've implemented this interface for several customer sites with no problem. The latest customer, though... problems. We've turned on logging in the apps on either end, and also installed Wireshark on the PC to log raw tcpip traffic. With that, we've proved that my server app successfully sends the message out, the pc receives the message, but the client app doesn't see it. (This is a totally intermittent problem, which is why it's such a pain to troubleshoot.)
The socket details are as simple as they come: one socket handling two way communications between the server and the pc. The messages are plain ascii text and fairly short (not XML). The server initiates communications by sending the first message, and then the client responds with several messages. The socket is kept open at all times while the apps are running. The client app is designed so that the end user can only process one case at a time, which prevents message collisions from happening. They have some sort of polling set up, their app "hibernates" until it sees the initiating message from the server.
The third party vendor has advised me to add a few second delay before I send them the initiating message. I can't see how that helps. If the client is "sleeping", just polling the socket waiting for a message, how does adding a delay before the first message help? It's not like we send two messages and the second one gets lost. It's losing the first message. So I don't see how it matters if we send that message now or two seconds from now.
I've asked them and they haven't given me details. It could be some proprietary details in their coding that they don't want to disclose to me, and that's fair. So I'm asking here because I'm always learning new things about socket programming. Maybe you guys can shed some light on how polling a tcpip socket can be affected by message timing?
Since its someone else's client and they won't tell you what its doing (other than saying 'insert a delay'), the answer is probably that their client is reading and discarding the message because its not yet in a state to deal with it. The delay will allow the client time to get into a state where it can respond to the message properly.
In other words, the client has a race condition. One easy way this can happen is if they have one thread for reading messages and another for dealing with them.
Short of running strace(1) on the client to see what system calls it is making, its tough to tell what the client is actually doing.

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