Which ports does the JIRA e-mail functionality require?

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx February 5, 2015

I have a JIRA 6.3.15 installed on an Ubuntu 14.04 in a VirtualBox VM. The host system for VirtualBox also is an Ubuntu 14.04. I configured JIRA to use SSL, set up a custom HTTPS port in JIRA's server.xml file, added a forwarding rule for that port in the VM configuration and opened the port in the host's firewall. All of this works fine.

 

Now I'd like to have JIRA send notification e-mails. I added an SMTP server to the JIRA configuration. This also works fine as long as I have the host system's firewall turned off (i.e. accept all incoming packets). But when the host firewall's default action for incoming packets is set to „Drop“, sending out e-mails from JIRA inside the VM over SMTP fails. The connection test fails with an UnknownHostException.

The host firewall's default actions for outgoing and forwarded packets is „Accept“.

 

So apparently some port for incoming packets needs to be opened in the host system for the JIRA e-mail functionality to work. Could anyone point me to which port this is? I have already tried 465 as both destination and source port without success, and I couldn't find any documentation on this.

 

 

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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx February 6, 2015

OK, I found it: First of all, the issue was not JIRA-specific, but just any DNS lookup from the guest or host failed. The root cause of this was the host firewall missing rules to accept all incoming packets belonging or related to already established connections. This applies to all ports, not just 53, as port 53 is the incoming port on the DNS server, but the DNS server's answer can reach my server (aka the DNS lookup client) at any port.

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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx February 6, 2015

True, any DNS lookup from the guest fails when the host's firewall is active. Even though port 53 is opened in the host's firewall for TCP and UDP and apparently 53 also is the right port. This is the nslookup result when setting the host firewall's defualt action to "Accept":

~$ nslookup google.com
Server:        x.x.x.x
Address:    x.x.x.x#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:    google.com
Address: 173.194.112.132
...

But I guess this is a topic for a different forum. wink

Thank you so far!

 

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crf
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February 5, 2015

The connection test fails with an UnknownHostException.

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/net/UnknownHostException.html

In other words, the DNS lookup failed.  The system running JIRA cannot resolve the DNS you have supplied for the SMTP server.  This probably means that the system running JIRA either does not have its networking set up properly or that traffic to TCP 53 and UDP 53 are not making it through.  Try running "nslookup whatever.your.smtp.server.is" from the machine running JIRA.

 

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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx February 5, 2015

Yes, I have. Also, just to be sure, I set it to 465 explicitly. This is why I already tried opening port 465 in the host systems' firewall (unsuccessfully).

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Timothy
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February 5, 2015

Have you confirmed which ports your SMTP uses? The default 465.

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