Skip to main content

Sending out email by python gaierror

I had to debug an instance of Plone that had an error to send out email today. First there was the whole problem with configuring sendmail to properly relay email. Finally I gave up, uninstalled sendmail and installed postfix.. :D Once I've verified the server can actually send email out, the problem still persist. It came to my mind that since the program (Plone) itself can send out email on other machines, it must be something else specific to that machine. Maybe python itself cannot send out email from that machine. So a quick google and I copied the code to send email out using python. It gave out the error more verbosely:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "tryemail.py", line 24, in ?
server = smtplib.SMTP(SERVER)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/smtplib.py", line 258, in __init__
addr = socket.gethostbyname(socket.gethostname())
socket.gaierror: (-2, 'Name or service not known')

Googling some more and I found this thread which basically says that python smtplib requires the hostname to be resolvable to send out email. So after some more googling (don't you just love google? :P) I found out how to change the hostname. So basically you need to change the HOSTNAME setting in /etc/sysconfig/network. But that requires a reboot. To avoid reboot just echo the hostname into /proc/sys/kernel/hostname. Finally. Now it's all done.. :)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Food first post

My blogs' name is High-Tech Rojak but I don't recall ever talking about food. So here's a first. Just recently I got some free time and finally got to cook the pasta I've bought for ages. So here's an account of how it went down.. :) Okay. That's the thing I cooked. I have no idea what it's called. At first I was thinking of buying the ribbon ones, then my wife looked at the colorful spiral ones and said "why not get these? they're more colorful" and so we got them (yes, we know nothing about pasta.. :) So I boiled it, actually put some salt and oil into the water so that they won't stick, drained it and tadaaaaa, you'd get the above. I remember once I tried to cook macaroni and I didn't drain it after boiling it, it filled up the whole pot. LOL... Learned my lesson. Next up the sauce. Like I said we don't know anything about pasta so here's the ingredients we prepared. Yes ladies and gentleman. Instant pasta sauce all bottl

Documentation is a must... after this.

I've been thinking quite a bit about documentation and the 'cost' it involves. And when I say documentation, I mean documentation in general about anything. One obvious case with the industry I'm involved in is user documentation (a.k.a The Manual). Creating great features in software takes time and effort but if it is not documented then the user won't even know about it and finally it never gets used. But then while documenting it you just wish that you're working on the next cool thing rather than have to write this up. So finally you end up not doing the documentation or doing it rather badly. Same thing with this blog writing. I have been doing some pretty interesting things with my phone (rooting it and using cynogenmod and all), some pretty significant life changes (my grandmother passed away) and a lot of other things which I should probably like to remember better or reflect more on it but not documented (here or anywhere permanent) and it would probabl

The Future Of Gaming

I love playing computer games. It's what originally drove me to learn computer programming, I wanted to create my own games. Until now I still have very little success with that, but... I have learnt to program web applications quite well and earning my pay using those skills. And I love open source software. Ever since I started programming professionally, my main work OS has always been Linux (various distributions and all and currently on Arch Linux). I always install dual-boot because... hardware problems (some projectors and printers just couldn't be detected by Linux when I started out, that's mostly not a problem now) and mainly to play games (sure there was some open source games available, but apart from "Battle for Wesnoth" and "FreeCiv" I don't actually recall any games I've played extensively enough to be remembered). But recently the gaming scene in LinuxLand has improved tremendously, partly thanks to the Windows 8 app store like