Jim Moy

Just a bit of housekeeping: I had a configuration problem that prevented the comment feature on the web log from functioning properly. It wasn’t MovableType’s fault, I just tried to have it talk to a server it couldn’t contact. The symptom was that a person making a comment on an entry would successfully post the article, but their browser hung as if the operation failed. Then they’d try again and I’d end up with multiple, duplicate comments.

MT tries to send me email every time someone makes a comment to a weblog entry. In my case, I had the SMTP server address configured with a name that resolved to a public address. However, my server is on a DMZ and the firewall was preventing connections from the internal network. So although outgoing packets were being passed just fine (the email server works fine, relaying outgoing mail), the dropped incoming packets made it appear as if the mail operation was hung, and prevented the MT process from completing the mail delivery.

Simple fix: change the configuration to point to the internal network name of the server instead of the publicly resolved address.