Tonight we upgraded our web and mail servers. What was supposed to be a simple, fairly mundane task, turned out to be hours of beatting my head against to wall without a clue what was going on.

In the recent past we had our server blow a gasket and disappear from the Internet. Josh frantically scrambled to put together a new machine and successfully had us back online in less than 12 hours. However, that machine just wasn’t trustworthy enough to leave online for long. So, we bought new web servers and got them ready to go online tonight.

We run SmarterMail, from SmarterTools as our mail server at iknowit.com and resonantmedia.com. So, when the server went offline the first time Josh did some research and found a link that gives simple and easy directions for migrating an existing SmarterMail setup to a new machine. Nice! It worked like a champ and we had the mail setup in no time at all. So, tonight, when it was time to migrate mail to the new server, I opened up the page, followed the directions, changed the firewall settings to the new box and... sat and stared as my mail client couldn’t find the mail server.

Huh? No way.

So, we dug deeper. Josh found this error in the SmarterMail logs:

The requested address is not valid in its context
   at System.Net.Sockets.Socket.DoBind(EndPoint endPointSnapshot, SocketAddress socketAddress)
   at System.Net.Sockets.Socket.Bind(EndPoint localEP)
   at TcpServerLib.Pooled.PooledTcpServer.StartListening(IPEndPoint ipEndPoint)

Hmmm.

I checked the Windows Firewall settings. Not a problem. Then I looked at the ports that were being monitored. Uh oh. Although the SmarterMail service was running, ports 25 and 110 were not being monitored. Odd.

After hours and hours of research nothing proved to be helpful. Josh went to bed.

Finally, I found this link on the SmarterMail sight that gave enough of a clue to figure out what was going on.

Turns out the entire problem boiled down to IP address problems with our existing domains. Since I imported the domains from another box, their IP addresses were already set to the IP address of the old mail server. So, after I edited the settings of each domain and set the IP address to the IP address of the new server, I checked the ports being monitored on the server and walla! We are back in business.

(BTW, the reason this was not an issue when we restored our mail server after the crash is because the new server replaced the old server and got the same IP address that had been used before.)

So, if you’re having problems getting SmarterMail to run on a new server and you copied your settings from a previously working server, go through each domain and insure that they all have the proper IP address setup.


Have a blessed day.