[thelist] Ruby on Rails, ssh, ActionMailer smtp quandries

Robert Gormley robert at pennyonthesidewalk.com
Tue Apr 11 00:56:12 CDT 2006


_____  

From: April [mailto:april at farstrider.org]
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Sent: Mon, 10 Apr 2006 19:59:07 -0400
Subject: [thelist] Ruby on Rails, ssh, ActionMailer smtp quandries

I'm working on a Ruby app (very beginner), and would like to use 
ActionMailer (because salted hash login generators relies on it).  Now a 
whole slew of problems are popping up, and ruining my so-far great rails 
experience.

1.  On my development box, I would really like to avoid setting up 
sendmail.  ActionMailer can use smtp, but not with SSL or with TLS 
authentification.  I also can't figure out how to fake out smtp servers 
that require you to login to pop before using them.  This has ruled out 
gmail, my ISP mail account, and my web hosting companies mail account. 
Does anyone know of a free or extremely low cost place I can get an smtp 
account that will work with ActionMailer?The best solution would be to ask your provider if they are able to either configure or allow SMTP from their web hosting boxes IP addresses - they may already have.


2.  I tried moving things to production (a third part hosted shared 
server) to at least assure myself that if I wrote the app without mail 
working, I could be bad and test it on production.  The hosting company 
does not allow SSH access, though, and I can't even figure out how to 
set up a sym link so I can run Rails on that domain.  They claim to 
offer ruby on rails, but the lack of SSH seems like a major hurdle to 
that, which leads to two questions:
2a.  Does anyone know how to set up a symlink without ssh so rails will 
cope?  Or is there a certain way I can upload things to erase the need 
for a symlink?You can cheat re creating symlinks:
http://blog.diefirma.de/2006-03-20/creating-symlinks-on-ftp-accounts/

Nasty, but guaranteed to work.

2b.  Will the lack of ssh continue to plague me in the future, to the 
point where I should go purchase a better hosting account?  I hate to 
split up my domains between different hosts, but not being able to 
follow any of the tutorials I've found to get me started is also 
frustrating.Ultimately any decent host will allow you SSH access - I can understand why some are reticent, but if they're secure and not a regular target for the kiddies...

Check out these guys, who I've used for everything from an entry level server to their top of the line dedicated boxes, without any hassles: www.a2hosting.com

They support MySQL 4.1, PostgreSQL 8.1 and RoR 1.1.1 - and also offer 'reseller hosting' - mainly being 'unlimited anything, domains, emails, etc, within the space / bw constraints of your plan.

If there's anything else I can help with, go for it.

Rob


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