lancerkind

After that, I’m going to have a beer!
[sig moderated]

I’d still love to hear how WordPress integrates itself into OSX 10.5 so it gets those registration emails out. So please give me the infodump if you’ve got it. (You can even send it to [email protected].)

Any way, after spending a total of 8-12 hours of un-consecutive time, I’ve got the registrations going out into the Internet. Here is the story, which will be useful to anyone else who is using WordPress on OSX 10.5. This was quite a rabbit hole!

The Problem
I installed WordPress, got it up and running, but realized that none of the email’s were getting out to the users who were registering.
So I snooped in the Console (love the OSX console/log viewer, simple and easy to use. Not at all like that piece of nastyness on Windows called the Event Viewer) and discovered that an OSX deamon was having to kill postfix about every couple of seconds. Then I used the left hand nav in the console to look at the mail log (its there beneath LogFiles->/var/log->mail. That revealed the log file mentioned at the top of this thread which mentions Spamhaus.
I studied the problem by creating a free account on google and yahoo mail and registering them and unregistering them. This is something I did probably a hundred times throughout this discovery process until I found a solution.

The response from Yahoo’s smtp server pointed me in the right direction. It had a URL. (Those Yahoos are very clever!)

Yahoo said:
(source: https://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/550-bl21.html)

553 5.7.1 [BL21] Connections not accepted from IP addresses on Spamhaus PBL
In our continuing efforts to protect our users from unsolicited email, Yahoo! Mail does not accept SMTP connections from dynamic or residential IP addresses, as determined by the Spamhaus PBL. If you are seeing this error message, please do not retry sending your message using the same IP address. Instead, please contact your ISP for information on which SMTP server you are authorized to use for your outbound email.
If you think that your IP address has been listed in error, you or your email administrator should contact Spamhaus. Once your IP is de-listed by Spamhaus, Yahoo! Mail will automatically unblock your IP within 48 hours.

Spamhaus said:
(source: https://www.spamhaus.org/pbl/query/PBL191731)

Outbound Email Policy of Comcast for this IP range:

Email sent by Comcast subscribers using a mail program such as Outlook Express are required to send the email through Comcast. To insure your mail program is properly configured, please visit https://www.comcast.net/help/faq/index.jsp?faq=Email117481. If you are a Comcast Commercial Services customer and need support, please contact [email protected]

And further:
(source: https://www.spamhaus.org/faq/answers.lasso?section=Spamhaus%20PBL)

What if I want to run a mail server on dynamic IPs listed in the PBL?
Due to the vast volumes of compromised PCs spewing spam “direct-to-mx” from dynamic domestic Internet connections, most major mail systems choose not to accept unauthenticated SMTP mail from servers on dynamic IPs.

Unless you use Authenticated SMTP, there is no way for a machine to differentiate between legitimate email sent by your server from a dynamic IP and spam mail sent by a virus on a dynamic IP next door to yours. Most networks therefore nowadays make it their policy not to accept unauthenticated SMTP email sent “direct-to-mx” from dynamic IP pools. The Spamhaus PBL enables networks to enforce this policy.

If you’re on a dynamic IP address and you absolutely need to run your own mail server, then use your ISP’s outgoing mail relay as a ‘smarthost’. If your ISP does not provide an outgoing mail relay, find a commercial smarthost provider. Such smarthosting arrangements are very common and inexpensive; contact your ISP or a hosting company for information.

Industry best practice is to block outgoing port 25 of dynamic pools (MAAWG documents).

I learned that what I was trying to do was use smtp.mail.yahoo.com as a relay since WordPress on OSX uses PostFix as the originating smtp server. My understanding at this point was that I could do this if I authenticated into that yahoo smtp server. But since Postfix ran as a daemon process, how do I program that to do so?

The rabbit hole got even deeper. After scanning few some man pages and googleing I found this: https://postfix.state-of-mind.de/patrick.koetter/smtpauth/smtp_auth_mailservers.html
I gave it a shot trying to relay through yahoo, watched the log files, registered my username/email addresses, and failed to get it to work.
A blog that referred to the above page mentioned an inexpensive product called MailServe (https://cutedgesystems.com/) that would give me a UI to configure postfix. I didn’t want to become an export on programming smtp agents so I dropped the $15 and bought it. Unfortunately, I found it quirky and the UI un-intuitive, but it did know better how to configure PostFix *.conf files better than I because I got much further with it. (There is a ridiculous amount of configuration you can do to Postfix which makes it completely overwhelming.)

So using MailServer I soldier on.

I start wondering if Yahoo is never going to work. I get further but still see problems in the log file and responses of distrust from yahoo. So I decide to use my bloody ISPs smtp server as a relay rather than yahoo, which is what most of the web pages I read keep suggesting.
Comcast said:
(Source: https://help.comcast.net/content/faq/What-are-the-Comcast-Mail-Server-Settings)

What are the Comcast Mail Server Settings?
The Comcast Mail server settings are as follows:

Outgoing mail (SMTP): smtp.comcast.net
Incoming mail (POP3): mail.comcast.net

I use the mac email client to send an email through the bloody thing to give me a level of confidence that it will at least relay those emails.

Then I got the bloody thing working by using MailServe to configure PostFix so:
“Masquarad as” set to my DNS domain name: skind.net
The “smart host name” to: smtp.comcast.net
Enable SASL Authentication and SSL.
UserID set to my comcast userid, password set to my comcast password.

After that, registration emails poured through the Internets and I danced!!!! (It complained about certificates but it works.) God DAMN that was a pain in the a**!
Here is the mail log:

Sep  3 22:48:01 MacMini postfix/postfix-script[45373]: starting the Postfix mail system
Sep  3 22:48:01 MacMini postfix/master[45374]: daemon started -- version 2.4.3, configuration /usr/local/cutedge/postfix/etc
Sep  3 22:48:26 MacMini postfix/pickup[45380]: 0672D193414: uid=70 from=<_www>
Sep  3 22:48:26 MacMini postfix/cleanup[45382]: 0672D193414: message-id=<[email protected]>
Sep  3 22:48:26 MacMini postfix/qmgr[45375]: 0672D193414: from=<[email protected]>, size=537, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Sep  3 22:48:26 MacMini postfix/pickup[45380]: 09FE7193416: uid=70 from=<_www>
Sep  3 22:48:26 MacMini postfix/cleanup[45382]: 09FE7193416: message-id=<[email protected]>
Sep  3 22:48:26 MacMini postfix/qmgr[45375]: 09FE7193416: from=<[email protected]>, size=521, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Sep  3 22:48:26 MacMini postfix/tlsmgr[45386]: warning: no entropy source specified with parameter tls_random_source
Sep  3 22:48:26 MacMini postfix/tlsmgr[45386]: warning: encryption keys etc. may be predictable
Sep  3 22:48:26 MacMini postfix/smtp[45387]: certificate verification failed for smtp.comcast.net: num=20:unable to get local issuer certificate
Sep  3 22:48:26 MacMini postfix/smtp[45387]: certificate verification failed for smtp.comcast.net: num=27:certificate not trusted
Sep  3 22:48:26 MacMini postfix/smtp[45385]: certificate verification failed for smtp.comcast.net: num=20:unable to get local issuer certificate
Sep  3 22:48:26 MacMini postfix/smtp[45385]: certificate verification failed for smtp.comcast.net: num=27:certificate not trusted
Sep  3 22:48:27 MacMini postfix/smtp[45387]: 09FE7193416: to=<[email protected]>, relay=smtp.comcast.net[76.96.30.117]:25, delay=1.3, delays=0.01/0.08/0.9/0.36, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 2.0.0 AVoS1a0043Dyk3c8NVoTHK mail accepted for delivery)

Notice the lovely “mail accepted for delivery!!!!

OK. I found the problem.
If you did the same thing that I did, you installed wordpress onto your server, and then used the webbrowser *on that server* to execute wp-admin/install.php.

When this is done, it screws up a setting called “WordPress Address (URL)” and “Blog address (URL)” which take the settings of https://localhost/blog rather than a real URL which should not have localhost in it. You need to fix this by getting into that admin page and changing it to a URL with the real hostname by getting into the admin screens, then in the upper right tab area, click on “Settings”. Then look for the URL settings I described. Upon doing this, and clicking save. The system will force you to relog in. (It even claimed to be doing a new install but I just humored it by letting it go ahead, whereupon it showed some error messages about those DB tables already existing. No fear, it all works out and my blog work was preserved.)

More about what those settings were doing to us:
All along you and I were trying to get it to work from a remote machine, what was happening is that we’d point our browser to https://<host>/blog and it would load index.php. Then at some point, wordpress would return to our browser a new url: https://localhost/blog. (I saw that this was happening and chalked it up to browser weirdness.)

The moral of the story:
It’s best to execute install.php from a remote client and avoid this step. Otherwise, you’ll have to correct it.

[sig moderated]

Bummer. This is the problem that I’m having and there has been no response. ??

What worked for me was to use 127.0.0.1 instead of “localhost” for the database host name.

Hey, for some reason it connects to the database when I change localhost to 127.0.0.1.

Hey, I’m getting the same problem. I just changed hostname in the config file to 127.0.0.1 and it got further along. I don’t know why hostname and 127.0.0.1 would behave differently.

Now I’ve got a Can’t select database error.

Off to debug,
==>Lancer—
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Perhaps post your wp-config.php file. (Remember to remove your password.)

In short, your url should look something like:
https://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php

Could you post the entire URL in the browsers address box? It’s probably trying to open install.php in the wrong location.

This happened to me too because I was following the quick install directions and I opened install.php using the browser to directly open the file (the url was of the nature of: file://…install.php) rather than going through the webserver.

Note that after editing the wp-config-sample.php and saving it as wp-config.php, the next step says “Upload the files”. Which means, put the wordpress directory into a location where you web server can server.

==>Lancer—
[sig moderated]