Category: OS

  • cPanel – Sender x has an outgoing mail hold. Message will be reattempted later.

    A client was having issues sending emails and receiving a number of alerts regarding delayed emails. After looking investigating a number of outbound emails where queued with a failure reason of:

    The account in question had hit the sending limits configured within cPanel and there emails where being held.

    Pre-Checks

    It is important you pre-check and make sure the hold is not legitimate such as a spam attempt / hacked site, I checked the emails being sent and due to a influx in online orders there email usage per day has significantly increased.

    1st Attempt

    Try running the following commands under sudo / root, replaceing [accountname] with the cpanel account name of the user. Then try send an email or retry sending an email in the queue.

    2nd Attempt

    The above worked for a couple accounts, but for one this did not work. There is 3 files depending on the type of block. Have a look in the following files below and remove the accountname / email address if present.

    I found my user within “/etc/outgoing_mail_suspended_users” and once removed, everything went back to normal.

    It is recommended a professional under takes these actions, please always backup existing files / configs.

  • Ubuntu EC2 configure Amazon Time Sync Service for Amazon AWS

    Having problems keeping your server time in sync? or a project requiring accurate timing? If your using a Amazon EC2 instance you can swap to using Chrony and Amazon Time Sync using the below commands.

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  • Using NANO with crontab for CentOS

    I dont like or know how to use VI correctly and by default CentOS likes to open everything in VI, I prefer nano and find when trying to edit the crontab CentOS always wants to use VI.

    Below command solves this issue and allows the use of nano for editing crontab. You will need to try either of the solutions below, I have found some servers both work, some only one or the other works.