HELP! Power outage now no server

Problem reported by Rod Strumbel - 8/31/2022 at 6:23 AM

Resolved

First this is the free edition I'm using at home... our office system is running just fine.

Ver. 8251

We had a multi-hour power outage last night that dropped the server hard.

Now when it came back online I am getting this message when trying to access the HTTPS site:

Never even get to the login screen.

IMAP access also isn't working. I don't have anything on POP3 so cannot readily test that.

I uninstalled and reinstalled 8251... same issues.

Normally I wouldn't harass anyone for a "free" version of anything, but... this could be a good learning experience for EVERYONE should this happen in a major production environment I would think. (Granted most of those will have far better power protection... or at least I hope so)

6 Replies

Reply to Thread

Rod Strumbel Replied

8/31/2022 at 6:40 AM

Looks like it is somehow related to a bootup configuration file ? (Event Viewer)

I'm not sure what file I'm looking for though.

There is no inner exception to view

Rod Strumbel Replied

8/31/2022 at 6:42 AM

Little more information found in another error in the event viewer for the MailService

Rod Strumbel Replied

8/31/2022 at 6:50 AM

After poking around, looks like the settings.json file at C:\Program Files (x86)\SmarterTools\SmarterMail\Services\Settings is corrupt, going to try and get it from backups.

Kyle Kerst Replied

8/31/2022 at 7:04 AM

Employee Post

Hey there Rod, you're on the right track! Your JSON configuration files were corrupted during the power outage which is an expected result unfortunately, since those files were likely being edited/read at the time. You should be able to stop the system service, restore a backup copy (we keep some in the Archived Data folder in that same directory) then start your service back up to get back online.

You may have some users in similar states though, so you can check the Error logs in Manage>Troubleshooting>View Logs for any references to password encrypted is null which will hint at that user's settings.json file being corrupted.

I hope that helps! Let us know how it goes :)

Kyle Kerst

Lead Internal Network/System Administrator

SmarterTools Inc.

smartertools.com