Troubleshooting startup issues

After installing the BMC Remedy Email Engine, users might find that email has not been sent or received. In this situation, email that is ready to be sent, has the status set to Yes, but the status does not change to Error or Sent.

The following troubleshooting sections describe some common scenarios and their possible solutions.

• Email engine does not work in a standalone or a server group environment
• Restarting a Windows system where the AR System server and BMC Remedy Email Engine are installed
• Identifying invalid application service passwords
• Determining if the wrong AR System server is specified
• Additional Information

Email engine does not work in a standalone or a server group environment

To troubleshoot this issue:

1. Verify the Service Failover operation ranking in the AR System Server Group Operation Ranking form. See,
   1. Setting-failover-rankings-for-servers-and-operations.
   2. Service-failover.
2. Verify the Service Status in the AR System Service Failover Whiteboard form. See, Service-provider-states. 

Restarting a Windows system where the AR System server and BMC Remedy Email Engine are installed

The BMC Remedy Email Engine service runs independent of the AR System server service. You might not encounter any issues if you start the BMC Remedy Email Engine service while the AR System server is running. However, if you start the BMC Remedy Email Engine service and the server is not available for some reason, then the BMC Remedy Email Engine fails to connect with the AR System server and generates ARERR 90.

To overcome this problem, use a load balancer that directs traffic between Email Engine services and the AR System server group. For information about load balancer, see Service-failover.

Identifying invalid application service passwords

When viewing the BMC Remedy AR System Email Error Logs form, you might not find any errors. Further, it might seem that the email daemon is not working at all. In this situation, the most likely issue is that the BMC Remedy Email Engine is not able to communicate with the AR System server.

If you encounter ARERR 623, you might have supplied an invalid application service password during installation. The BMC Remedy Email Engine uses the Application Service Password to communicate with the AR System server. When that password is changed at the server, you must change it for the BMC Remedy Email Engine by updating the EmailDaemon.properties file. For more information about the EmailDaemon.properties file, see EmailDaemon-properties-file.

To identify and correct an invalid password

For Windows, 

1. Start the BMC Remedy Email Engine from the command line.

2. Open the email.log file to note the JRE version used by BMC Remedy Email Engine. For JRE version, see Navigate to BMC Solution and product availability and compatibility utility (SPAC) 
   Typically, a functioning email daemon outputs the following status information:

   Checking connection to server: <ARSystemServerName>...
   Application has started Version: <emailEngineVersionNUmber>
   Using JRE: <JREVersionNumber>
   Successfully connected

   1. If email.log is not present, these messages are displayed on the console.

   2. If the email daemon was unable to connect to the AR System server, you might see the following error:

      Checking connection to server: <ARSystemServerName> ...
      ERROR (623): Authentication failed;
      Cannot connect.

      If you see this, the application service password you had created during installation is incorrect. Ensure that you use only ASCII characters in the password. Using non-ASCII characters, accented characters, or special characters from Windows-1252 encoding (for example, AB#Cdefgh1@I€j€kl#) generates an installation error.

3. To fix the issue, run EmailStart.bat by passing the -p "applicationServicePassword" parameter.
    This updates the system with the correct password by applying the changes to the EmailDaemon.properties file.   

For UNIX,

see EmailDaemon-properties-file. 

Determining if the wrong AR System server is specified

Another common issue is that you specified the wrong AR System server name when you installed the BMC Remedy Email Engine. You can fix this issue by executing a search and replace on the contents of the EmailDaemon.properties file.

To determine if a wrong AR System server is specified

1. Open the EmailDaemon.properties file.
2. Replace all references to the incorrect server name with the correct server name. Because the file uses the server name in several places, the search and replace functionality is required.

3. Check the connection to the AR System server if you are using a specific TCP port or RPC number. Update these references as well in the EmailDaemon.propertiesfile:

   com.bmc.arsys.emaildaemon.<ARSystemServerName>.TCP=4040
   com.bmc.arsys.emaildaemon.<ARSystemServerName>.RPC=0

   Remember that the ARSystemServerName tag is the name of the server against which the BMC Remedy Email Engine is running and could be an alias like production (for example, com.bmc.arsys.emaildaemon.production.TCP=4040 ).

4. Examine the BMC Remedy AR System Email Mailbox Configuration forms to make sure that you have configured your mailboxes correctly. Check to make sure that you have not disabled any of the mailboxes.
5. Save your changes to the EmailDaemon.properties file.
6. Stop and re-start the BMC Remedy Email Engine.
    The console output should show that the email daemon has successfully connected to the AR System server with no errors.

Additional Information

For more information, see the blog Making use of EmailStart.bat file shared on BMC Communities.