EWS hangs while gromox-http stays active

souverain · 2026-05-22T08:31:39+00:00

Hello, We encountered a temporary issue with EWS access on a grommunio/gromox server. The webmail was working, but Apple Mail on macOS could no longer conn...

souverain

WalterH gromox-3.7.224.m1fee87e-lp156.27.1.x86_64

souverain

Additional update:

The issue happened again this morning.

Before restarting gromox-http, the local EWS test returned:

curl: (28) Operation timed out after 10002 milliseconds with 0 bytes received
HTTP=000 TIME=10.002759

After restarting only gromox-http:

HTTP=405 TIME=0.000409

So the same pattern is confirmed again: gromox-http remains active, but EWS stops responding locally until the service is restarted.

WalterH

Try with the newer gromox versions: (3.7.226 for the supported edition and 3.7.239 for the community edition) .

Mister2

I have the same issue on both Grommunio servers I look after. One is running on OpenSuse 16.0 and the other on OpenSuse 15.6 - both from the latest OpenSuse 15.6 appliance ISO, the former having been updated using @WalterH excellent upgrade recipe.

Running 'systemctl restart gromox-http' does seem to work but takes several minutes to execute using the commandline. MacOS mail is once again delivered once gromox-http is restarted. I have tried WalterH - suggesting to apply the Gromox update 3.7.239 yesterday but issue persists. I have just seen gromox 3.7.240 is available - will try that next otherwise system is fully up to date for a OpenSuse 16.0 system.

As per @souverain's original post email is delivered OK to iPhones and the Gromox-Web Client - issue is just with MacOS mail client.

souverain

WalterH i have update with this version gromox-3.7.240.m66283a7-lp156.37.1.x86_64 but the same situation is already her :-(

souverain

Mister2 yep i have the same version but nothing change, the same issue :-(

1of16

same problem with 3.7.226.ab0dc23-lp160.4.1 🙁
started about one week ago

weini

Same issue here with gromox 3.7.240.

Event worse, I can´t go back to 3.7.130 (last version that didn´t have the issue to my understanding), because this triggers another bug discussed here: https://community.grommunio.com/d/2685-debian-13-update-error-after-upgrading-libc-bin-package.

Can we please label this as BUG to get a bit more visibility?

SHP

Good morning.

Perhaps same issue here with gromox 3.7.226 (Debian 13), but with Outlook-Clients.
We have to restart gromox-http that lasts approx. 1 minute to stop the service.

Mister2

I now also have an Outlook client who is experiencing the same issue as reported by SHP . So now have both MacOS Mail clients and Outlook (16) clients suffering from periodic outages (12 to 36hrs) of email until they report the issue and I restart the gromox-http service. After around a minute the services restarts and mail flow is restored.

EDIT: Can we get this ticket raised to a 'BUG' as it appears several servers are now experiencing this issue.

mho

Same situation here with grommunio supported - gromox 3.7.226.ab0dc23:
Log contains theses messages when the problem with Outlook (Outlook 2024) occurs:

Mai 28 07:12:56 server gromox-http[1643]: Rejecting connection from [::1]:37826: reached 400 connections (http.cfg:context_num)
Mai 28 07:13:05 server gromox-http[1643]: Rejecting connection from [::ffff:127.0.0.1]:50362: reached 400 connections (http.cfg:context_num)

After restarting gromox-http service (yes SHP restart takes 1 minute here too, which is quite long) all is fine for usually several hours.
For now i've opened a support ticket.

weini

Another attempt allowed me to downgrade to 3.7.130 now.
I first did a full upgrade "apt dist-upgrade" and then installed the older version of the gromox package.

souverain

Mister2 poke @WalterH can you do it please ?

Andrew

I believe I have the same problem on EL9 with gromox 3.7.242.m0d06f09-40.1.
About twice a day, Outlook loses connection. In the NGINX logs for Autodiscover, EWS, and MAPI I see no live upstreams while connecting to upstream. Restarting gromox-http returns it to service, although as the others have mentioned it is suspiciously slow to restart, like it's waiting for a timeout.

Duese6

I am seeing very similar behavior across multiple systems.

The last version that worked reliably for us was:
gromox-3.7.130

Since updating beyond that version, we started seeing occasional hangs or long-running requests within gromox-http.

Today I updated one system to:
gromox 3.7.242.m0d06f09-lp160.39.1 on openSUSE Leap 16.

With this version, the shutdown / restart behavior of gromox-http has clearly improved — it now stops cleanly and no longer hits the systemd timeout.

However, the underlying issue still seems to be present:
Outlook clients occasionally lose the connection, which suggests that some requests are still hanging or timing out during runtime.

This looks very similar to what is described here regarding long-running (possibly EWS) requests inside gromox-http.

Duese6

Small addition based on further testing:

I was able to correlate the behavior more closely.

Whenever Outlook loses the connection / appears to hang, gromox-http is also unable to stop cleanly at that exact moment. In that situation, stopping the service results in a timeout and SIGKILL.

Example:

Outlook hangs / disconnects
at the same time, systemctl stop gromox-http hits TimeoutStopSec and requires SIGKILL

This strongly suggests that there is an active request (likely still running inside gromox-http) blocking the shutdown.

When no client is hanging, gromox-http usually stops cleanly.

So it seems directly related to long-running / stuck requests rather than the shutdown logic itself.

souverain

Duese6 As for me, I install the latest updates every day, but the problem still persists

WalterH

souverain Mister2 poke @WalterH can you do it please ?

What to do?

souverain

WalterH Can we get this ticket raised to a 'BUG' as it appears several servers are now experiencing this issue.

Mister2

@WalterH Further to souverain post, it appears that most platforms for Grommunio (Appliance, Debian, EL9) are now reporting Mac OS Mail repeatedly stops updating, Outlook (various versions) either does the same (stops updating) or sits at 'trying to connect to Microsoft Exchange Server'., Currently those experiencing the issue have taken to @souverain workaround of restart gromox-http. This seems to take around 1 minute to stop and then restart the service. Once done mail flows again for a while until it stops again - requiring another restart.

I myself run both a OpenSuse 16.0 appliance and an OpenSuse 15.6 appliance (waiting for a window to do the update to OS 16 with the users) with all available updates that have been published up to this morning (Gromox 3.7.242.m0d06f09-lp160.39.1).

The ticket is tagged with 'Suggestions' this now needs to be changed to 'BUG' and I don't seem to have the permissions to do that. Hence the 'poke' to you @WalterH to et the tag changed, and see if the developers can have a look at this issue as it seems to be hitting more instances of Grommunio as each day goes by.

Thanks for all the hard work you and the developement team(s) do - we all really appreciate your efforts.