Avamar: Emailhome stop working post upgrade to version 19.8.

Post upgrade to Avamar 19.8 MCS alert errors are seen twice daily with "Event email notification failed."

Example



From MCS logs we see:

WARNING: com.avamar.asn.service.ServiceException: Unable to send email notification: Could not connect to SMTP host: <smtpserver>, port: 587; nested exception is: java.net.ConnectException: Connection timed out (Connection timed out) at com.avamar.mc.event.EmailEventNotification.fire(EmailEventNotification.java:882) at com.avamar.mc.event.EventProfileHandler$EmailDatabaseThread.run(EventProfileHandler.java:443) at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)
Caused by: javax.mail.MessagingException: Could not connect to SMTP host: <smtpserver>, port: 587; nested exception is: java.net.ConnectException: Connection timed out (Connection timed out)


We might also see the following errors:

WARNING: com.avamar.asn.service.ServiceException: Unable to send email notification: null
at com.avamar.mc.event.EmailEventNotification.fire(EmailEventNotification.java:882)
at com.avamar.mc.event.EventProfileHandler$EmailDatabaseThread.run(EventProfileHandler.java:443)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)
Caused by: javax.mail.AuthenticationFailedException

There are new features or entries in the 19.8 /usr/local/avamar/var/mc/server_data/prefs/mcserver.xmlFrom the mcserver.xml we see:

<entry key="email_smtp_port" value="587" />

<entry key="enable_smtp_authentication" value="true" />

Before upgrade

admin@AVE:/usr/local/avamar/var/mc/server_data/prefs/>: grep -i smtp mcserver.xml
                <entry key="smtpHost" value="mail" />
admin@AVE:/usr/local/avamar/var/mc/server_data/prefs/>:

After upgrade

admin@AVE:/usr/local/avamar/var/mc/server_data/prefs/>: grep -i smtp mcserver.xml
                <entry key="smtpHost" value="mail.emc.com" />
                <entry key="email_smtp_socketFactory_class" value="javax.net.ssl.SSLSocketFactory" />
                <entry key="email_smtp_starttls_enable" value="true" />
                <entry key="email_smtp_socketFactory_port" value="" />
                <entry key="email_smtp_port" value="587" />
                <entry key="email_smtp_startssl_enable" value="false" />
                <entry key="enable_smtp_authentication" value="true" />
admin@AVE:/usr/local/avamar/var/mc/server_data/prefs/>:

Port 587 coupled with TLS encryption, ensures that email is submitted securely and following the guidelines set out by the IETF therefore 587 is now the new default mail submission port, replacing port 25.

Customers who are still using the old mail servers or configurations with the old values can still be using port 25 with no smtp authentication required. 

If so update the /usr/local/avamar/var/mc/server_data/prefs/mcserver.xml with the following values:

<entry key="email_smtp_port" value="25" />

<entry key="enable_smtp_authentication" value="false" />

Restart MCS

admin@AVE~: mcserver.sh --restart