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cPanel Update Bug and Fix

CPanel Update Bug And Fix

The other day, one of my regular clients received an error in his Bluehost VPS (Virtual Private Server) notifying him that a scheduled cPanel update had failed. He contacted us about this;  provided the error message; and we went to work on resolving this issue for him. Turns out that his RPM database had become corrupted over time and needed to be rebuilt. We were able to do that for him, but that is not the subject of this post.

The Problem

Actually, it seemed to us that the update went smoothly and without a hitch. All of our QA checkpoints passed, we were able to reinstate service monitoring, and all services were able to restart as usual.

However, later in the day my client ran a test order in his Magento-powered store, and he noticed that he didn’t receive the order email. He reached out and reported the issue to us. Within a few minutes I was able to confirm that Exim (mail server) was not working properly. I checked the log files using:

vi /var/log/exim_mainlog

Towards the end of the log file I saw this entry:

rejected by non-SMTP ACL: failed to expand ACL string "${if eq{$originator_uid}{${perl{user2uid}{nobody}}}{1}{0}}": Undefined subroutine &main::use$n::user2uid called.

So, it was confirmed. There was a bug with Exim.

The Solution

After rebuilding Exim a few times and attempting to update cPanel again to no avail, I did what any seasoned professional would do. I began checking the cPanel forums and finally came across this title: PHP mail stopped working, from just last week. Apparently, there was a bug in the cPanel update script which caused the permissions of the Exim perl script to be set to 0000. Here is the fix:

cd /etc
ls -l
chmod 0644 exim.pl

This will effectively reassign the correct permissions to exim.pl. Then, lastly restart using:

services exim restart

There you go! Your emails should start working again.

cPanel Update Solved

Credit to: Cpanel forum member: rpvw for disclosing the solution and Ryan Berding, Tech Analyst at cPanel support for informing the cPanel community of the solution.

If you are experiencing this issue, or any other issues with your server, feel free to contact us or request a quote. You may also call us at +1 (712) 797-7017 or Skype us at dcgws_internet_solutions.

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