Install on Shared Host

[marcusstair]

First, let me think you for the amazing work with SuiteCRM. I have use SugarCRM CE for years and had to install and tweak to get it to do what SuiteCRM does out of the box.

I host my servers at my home on VMware ESX server 5.1. To evaluate SuiteCRM I installed Turnkey’s VM image. Needless to say it was a very impressive platform. Setup easy and everything worked with out any adjustments.

As I use SuiteCRM more and more I decided to install in a hosted environment for more reliability and better uptime. This is where things got strange.

Now on to the questions.

1. Email settings, No matter what settings I use “Admin > Email Settings” will not send emails test or otherwise. I also used the same settings used on my dedicated system.
2. Permissions on files and folders are not clear to me. I set them to the same as I would in SugarCRM but still get strange results.

Still working through the setup but expect more surprises.

To help catch some of this has anyone documented a Shared Hosting install?

Looking forward to responses.

[Will]

Hi there,

We recommend that you set the group user and owner to apache. As a sidenote, please include the “theme” directory in your 775 permissions list.

Thanks,

Will.

[marcusstair]

Thank you for the reply. I checked the permissions and all are correct. On my shared hosting provider I only have one user:group available to me, the one that owns the www directory. I received a response from the provider detailing the problem last night. Please see below.

Your case was forwarded to me by Dimitar. I carefully investigated it and as part of my investigation, I used the Linux strace utility, which attached my console to the PHP process and I was able to read the exact instructions it made towards the server. The part relevant to the e-mail error is as follows:

Code:
recvfrom(5, “250-serv01.siteground292.com Hello www.sta-rep.com [184.154.233.15]\r\n250-SIZE 52428800\r\n250-8BITMIME\r\n250-AUTH LOGIN PLAIN\r\n250-STARTTLS\r\n250 HELP\r\n”,
sendto(5, “AUTH LOGIN\r\n”, 12, MSG_DONTWAIT, NULL, 0) = 12
recvfrom(5, “334 VXNlcm5hbWU6\r\n”, 8192, MSG_DONTWAIT, NULL, NULL) = 18
sendto(5, “c3VnYXJjcm1Ac3RhLXJlcC5jb20=\r\n”, 30, MSG_DONTWAIT, NULL, 0) = 30
recvfrom(5, “334 UGFzc3dvcmQ6\r\n”, 8192, MSG_DONTWAIT, NULL, NULL) = 18
sendto(5, “\r\n”, 2, MSG_DONTWAIT, NULL, 0) = 2

The output explained line by line is as follows:

• The first line is the standard banner which is displayed upon connecting to our SMTP service. It tells us which methods are available and what exactly is supported.
• The second line is sent (hence the sendto() call) by the script, requesting a authentication sequence to be initiated.
• The third line is the server responding in base64 format with ‘VXNlcm5hbWU6’ which translated equals to ‘Username:’
• The fourth line is again sent by the script in base64 encoding, which translated is ‘sugarcrm@sta-rep.com’
• Next is the server responding, asking for password (‘UGFzc3dvcmQ6’ --> ‘Password:’)
• FInally, the script responds to the password request with just “\r\n” which are the symbols for a new line character or ‘Enter’ key press on a keyboard.

What seems to be the problem is the last step, where the script does not wish to send the saved password for some reason. I tried debugging the issue further, but was unable to find the exact function which sends the login details. I would recommend you to get in touch with the script developers and ask them for further help, or at least the location where the authentication is being performed, so we can look at the code and correct this.

Hope this helps make SuiteCRM even stronger!

Marcus

[crobinson]

Did you check use SMTP authentication on your Email Settings?

this, if I remember correctly, tells the system it has to log into the SMTP server before it can send an email. A popular setting to prevent SMTP servers from being used by spammers.

[marcusstair]

The issue is not related to SMTP authentication. For the record I did try selecting and un-selecting the authentication before I posted.

My hosting provider clearly stated what the issue is. I’m hoping SuiteCRM can address or point out the issue in the script. If not I will head over to the SugarCRM forum and see if it is in the base code.

Will, any response?

[hostnet]

Hi there,

Can you post a link the the Turnkey vm image. I would like to evaluate SuiteCRM on my ESX server and can’t find an image for it.

Thanks,

Kirill

[marcusstair]

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/download?file=turnkey-sugarcrm-13.0-wheezy-amd64-vmdk.zip

This is a vmdk for SugarCRM but the environment is tuned for the platform. I have used it for a long time and very happy with it.

I don’t recommend upgrading as it doesn’t perform as well as a fresh install. Also, if your on a clean vm why not simply install a new instance anyway.

If you need help working with turnkey email me and I’ll give you a hand.

marcusstair at gmail.com