Eventum is an open source ticketing system created by Mysql to process technical support requests at their help desk. It's one of those well-kept secret projects for some reason. Besides Eventum there is RT Tracker another great open source ticketing system

We chose to use Eventum for two reasons, firstly we are stronger at PHP than Perl and secondly we use dotproject for project management and there is a module available that integrates the two. At time of writing this wasn't working with version 2.0.1 of Evetnum though.

Eventum - Outgoing mail not working

When we first set it up and tested it all was working well. After we began to use it in production we noticed that outgoing mails didn't seem to work. From our analysis of the mail log files it was clear that eventum was not even trying to send out the mails. Sending emails via email client, on the accounts setup for this purpose, worked so it wasn't a mail server setup issue.

The cron job was running the script to send emails diligently too. Eventually running the script manually revealed the problem:

php process_mail_que.php

Resulted in the error message

ERROR: There is already a process (pid=17733) of this script running. If this is not accurate, you may fix it by running this script with '--fix-lock' as the only parameter.

So somehow during our testing this lock file had been created and not clean up. A simple

/usr/bin/php process_mail_queue.php --fix-lock

Fixed the problem and now everything is working as it should.