Dejal Home

Simon icon Simon
Flexible server monitoring

Introducing Simon 5!

Simon version 5 is now available. It is a massive update, introducing a much-requested feature: syncing the Simon data between multiple Macs, plus a Simon Status service, a Link Checker filter, improved Find filter, iMessage and Speak Error notifiers, a new app icon, and much more.

Important: please note that Simon 5 requires a minimum of macOS 10.12 (Sierra), and is a paid upgrade from Simon 4. Purchasers since September 1, 2020 automatically get a version 5 license (that also works in previous versions).

Read the Simon What's New page for details.

Simon 3.6.1 crashing when Sending mail

Fri, 2014-07-11 08:00 — bdperk

I upgraded Simon to 3.6.1 for a customer on a Mac Mini running OS 10.8.5 yesterday.
They were running 2.* on a older machine running OS 10.6. The disk on that machine is dying, hence the move/upgrade.
I copied our tests, notifications, etc from the old machine to the new. Things seemed to be OK.

I noticed I didn't receive my daily "Pulse" email notification this morning. In checking this out I manually ran the pulse test and noticed that Simon crashed. This is reproducible.

I delete and recreated my original pulse test. I also deleted and recreated the email notification.
It still crashes.
This machine is using sendmail for notifications (To use a mail Client I'd need an institutional user account. The institution only give those to people. For hopefully obvious reasons I can't use mine).

I also notice that test changes aren't being saved across crashes. For example I added a new test that dissapeared after the crash. I also turned off the Pulse Test's "auto pause" to debug this problem. My original settings are now back in place (this makes me think that the original Pulse test wasn't actually deleted).

AttachmentSize
Simon_2014-07-11-084301_.crash_.txt51.92 KB
‹ Can't create long "Minutes" Pause TLS security in Simon Email SMTP Notifier ›
Fri, 2014-07-11 08:05 — bdperk

Re: Simon 3.6.1 crashing on Pulse Test

Attached crash log to original forum post

Fri, 2014-07-11 10:06 — bdperk

Re: Simon 3.6.1 crashing on Pulse Test

From my observations crashes occur whenever mail is sent. Testing an Email Notifier w/ Notify Now results in Simon crashing.

I'm looking out how our email notifiers are configured on the old machine (running 2.5.70 and notice that the 3.6.1 configuration doesn't offer the same options.

Under 2.5.7, the only option "Transport" option choice is "Automatic" and the Options button is disabled.
3.6.1 doesn't offer an automatic option. I'm trying the Mailer option, using a basic /usr/sbin/sendmail -t.

As mentioned earlier using Apple Mail is not an option from this particular machine.

Fri, 2014-07-11 10:34 — David Sinclair
David Sinclair's picture

Re: Simon 3.6.1 crashing on Pulse Test

Thanks for the crash log. Unfortunately I don't see any helpful clues as to the cause in there.

Re the Transport options, "Automatic" was using Apple's message framework, which is no longer available. So it was replaced with "Apple Mail". The custom transports are still available; the Options button edits the selected transport (so isn't available for Apple Mail).

I'll see if I can reproduce the issue myself.

If I can't, and you can't get it working, another option could be to set up a PHP script (or similar) on your server to send mail, and call that via a Script-based notifier.

As it happens, I am currently working on Simon's Email plugin. In the next version, it will use a different framework (MailCore) for custom SMTP transports, and it also adds support for using Email as a service to send, receive, or cycle (send & confirm receipt). Those changes won't help your situation, though.

Fri, 2014-07-11 13:27 — bdperk

Re: Simon 3.6.1 crashing on Pulse Test

David,

A few more things. When setting this up yesterday, I ran a few email notification tests and didn't see these crashes. The only thing that changed after that was that I had to tweak a few tests to work with newer filtering options. I also configured launchd (using Lingon X) to make sure Simon is already running.

I also note that whenever I open Notifiers, the Apple Mail app launches and bounces in the dock. It isn't configured (and really can't be given the way the institution manages personal user mail).

Simple sendmail tests from the command line to the accounts that normally receive our Simon reports are delivered.

I've reverted to running the old 2.5.7 system for now.

Wed, 2014-07-16 09:11 — bdperk

Re: Simon 3.6.1 crashing when Sending mail (Hopefully solved)

With our old Simon machine on its last legs, I really needed to get this running and spent some time this morning trying options that might allow Simon to send mail without causing a crash.

I determined that the machine (but not Simon) could use sendmail by sending a bunch of tests from the command line.

Considering that I had copied all the notifiers from our old installation to this this one, I wondered if there was corruption or differences in format between versions that might be causing the notifiers to crash Simon.

I created a new simple notifier and set the transport to use /usr/sbin/sendmail with NO FLAGS.
This worked! It didn't crash Simon and an email was sent and received.

I then set an existing Notifier to use this transport. It still crashed Simon.
I then changed the Notifier Transport to SMTP, Saved, them back to Mailer (eg, /usr/sbin/sendmail), Saved and retested. It didn't crash Simon and an email was sent and received.

I repeated the above step for more than a dozen notifiers and all seems to be OK.

Corruption or incompatible old format?

Wed, 2014-07-16 20:57 — David Sinclair
David Sinclair's picture

Re: Simon 3.6.1 crashing when Sending mail

Thanks for the perseverance with this. I'm glad you solved it. It might be incompatible options, I don't know... though I don't know why that would cause a crash.