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The Case of the Messed Up Fax

Bill — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 13:27:36 +0000

We use a web application to create purchase orders. We send purchase orders to our vendors by printing the web page to our fax server. Two days ago we sent out two faxes with large black blotches on the page. There were purchase orders that were sent out before and after these faxes that were fine. Something was different about these purchase orders. We found that we could duplicate the problem on different workstations. When I previewed the fax on my laptop I could see that it was already corrupt. If I printed the web page to the printer or created a PDF it was fine. My boss thought it might have to do with our recent roll-out of the new Windows 7 laptops. So I checked the HTML for odd characters and did not find anything. It was about this time I noticed that the two problem purchase orders were about the same size. One purchase order had 36 line items while the other purchase order had 37 line items. I also found out that I used Firefox or Google Chrome to print the web page, it created the fax correctly. This printing problem was specific to Internet Explorer. The final clue was found when I went to my old laptop and it displayed the faxes correctly. When I checked its page setup I noticed that it was using an A4 paper size rather than the standard Letter size. After a little fiddling with the page settings, I determined that when I changed the bottom margin on my new Windows 7 laptop to 0.5 or 1.0 inch the fax would be created correctly.

My boss remained unconvinced. Why did we not see this problem before? That was a good question. After a little investigating of our fax log I found a corrupted fax over a month ago. Since this problem is rare and the subsequent faxes went out successfully, they resent the fax manually and did not bother to tell anyone of the problem.

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Security Essentials to the rescue

Bill — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 22:23:38 +0000

In all of my years of being a system administrator I have never seen a machine as infected as I saw today at my sister-in-law’s house. When we turned on the machine, the fist sign of problems was that it did not go to the normal home page. When I tried to do a search the links on the results page did not work. Naturally my sister-in-law did not know what happened. Since the MacAfee software had expired and my sister-in-law was fussing about the cost of virus checking software, I downloaded a current version of Microsoft Essentials. I had to reboot the machine into safe mode with networking support before I could download the current virus and spyware definitions. Microsoft Essentials found a multitude of Trojans and worms. I cleaned the computer and rebooted several times. Finally I decided to perform a full scan before clicking on the “Clean” button. The full scan took a long time but the computer is now working as expected.

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Adding IP Restrictions to IIS 6

Bill — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 14:04:33 +0000

A big thanks goes out to the obligatorymoniker and his script for programmatically adding IP restrictions to IIS6. I was looking for a better script to add IP restrictions. My previous script added the restrictions one IP range at a time. This script was adequate for a small number of IP restrictions but recently I was asked to add IP restrictions for every country we do not ship to. We had credit card fraud transaction from one of these countries and the boss was mad. After using Perl and a CIDR to merge the adjacent networks, I still had over 18,000 IP ranges to deny. Using my old script I tried to add these IP ranges to our test system this took over an hour to load. Your script loads the ranges in a couple of seconds. Here is how I did this:

I went to http://www.countryipblocks.net/ to get the IP ranges I wanted to block. Beware these ranges include bogon networks(e.g. 192.168.0.0). The first time I applied the IP ranges I blocked myself out.
I used the perl script below to merge the networks.
I used the obligatorymoniker IP Security.vbs script to load the ranges. You will have to change the "IIS://localhost/smtpsvc/1" to the site you want to add the IP restrictions to.

use Net::CIDR::Lite;
use NetAddr::IP::Lite;
my $cidr = Net::CIDR::Lite->new;
# Disallow IPs

open (IPDISALLOW, "ip_disallow.txt") || die "couldn't open the file!";

while ($record = ) {
 if (substr($record,0,1) != '#'){
#print $record;
 $cidr->add($record);
 }
}

close(IPDISALLOW);
#print "$_\n" for $cidr->list;
foreach ($cidr->list) {
my $ip = new NetAddr::IP::Lite $_;
#print "The address is ", $ip->addr, " with mask ", $ip->mask, "\n" ;
print $ip->addr, ",", $ip->mask,"$_\n";
}

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Adventures with iRedMail – Part III

Bill — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 14:10:46 +0000

Recently I installed iRedmail at work so that we could include DKIM signatures in our newsletters. Every week we send out a newsletter to 96,000 former customers. It takes about 13 hours to send the newsletter. Yahoo is probably our most important email domain and they want us to implement DKIM. A couple of weeks ago we started seeing Yahoo limit our sending rate. Obviously they had a problem with something in our newsletter. So we re-analyzed the error codes we were getting during the newsletter mailing and implemented DKIM. The problem is fixed. Here is how I implemented this version of iRedMail.

I implemented a VMware version of iRedMail to sign newsletter emails using DKIM. I used Ubuntu 9 server version(optimized for VMware version) to build appliance.

The server works as a mail proxy in front of the SMTP server we use exclusively for the newsletter. It signs and relays the email to the existing SMTP server. I kept the existing SMTP server so that I could continue to use my existing procedures for parsing the log files to identify old/obsolete mailboxes.
I created iRedMail users in LDAP to relay local users to mailboxes on Exchange.
My primary bottleneck is still my mail transmission to the Internet speed, 2 per second. I can create newsletter emails at about 8 per second.
On an old Proliant DL350 G4 iRedMail consumes about 40% of the dual CPU computer for four hours.

Since I had experience installing iRedMail it went quickly. The biggest bug I had to fix was the AWStats/permissions problem on the mail.log file.

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Parsing log files with Powershell

Bill — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 13:00:47 +0000

I found myself wanting to parsing a log file to find out which domain was getting the most newsletters. There are a variety of ways you can do this. Typically I would use Excel but there were more than 65K lines to import so I had to use something different. For kicks I did it in Powershell and here is how I did it in three lines. The log file is a tab delimited file without a header line. The field we are going to count is called, “RecipientDomain”.

 $header = "ServerFQDN","ServerDomain","IPAddress","MailTime","ClientDomain","RecipientDomain","Sender","Recipient","MessageID","Status","User","Size","ClientFQDN"
$a = import-csv smtp-201007060000.csv -delimiter `t -header $header | where-object {($_.Status -eq "RECV=OK") }
$a | group-object -property RecipientDomain -noelement | sort -property @{Expression="Count";Descending=$true}, @{Expression="Name";Descending=$false} | Select-object -First 20

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10 Laws of Productivity :: Tips :: The 99 Percent

Bill — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 00:43:15 +0000

Here are some great tips on improving your productivity. I included the highlights below. Read the full article to get the full explanation and some explanations.

10 Laws of Productivity :: Tips :: The 99 Percent

1. Break the seal of hesitation.
2. Start small.
3. Protoype, prototype, prototype.
4. Create simple objectives for projects, and revisit them regularly.
5. Work on your project a little bit each day.
6. Develop a routine.
7. Break big, long-term projects into smaller chunks or “phases.”
8. Prune away superfluous meetings (and their attendees).
9. Practice saying “No.”
10. Remember that rules – even productivity rules – are made to be broken.

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Importing Self-signed CA Certificate into Windows 7

Bill — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 19:21:40 +0000

Yesterday I opted to create self-signed certificates for my local servers. Most of my local servers already had self-signed certificates with default names so it looked like a simple task. I found this document, Creating Certificate Authorities and self-signed SSL certificates, and in a few minutes I created a new Certificate Authority and replaced my existing server certificate. I checked the site via my web browser and it complained about needing the Certificate Authority certificate. So I copied the CA certificate to my PC and imported it into the Trusted Root Certification Authorities using IE8. Despite a message saying it succeeded, it really didn’t import the certificate. I re-started the browser and re-started the computer but the certificate refused to show up. I finally opted to login as the Administrator and install the certificate to the Trusted Root Certification Authorities of the computer account. I suspect that the key requirement is to import into the computer account. For those unfamiliar with the process you open a command window and run “mmc”. Next you click File-Add Snapin and add the Certificates Snap-in. When you add the plug-in it will prompt you to select which account you want to update. Select the computer account, the local system, and click to add the Snapin. Now navigate to Trusted Root Certification Authorities and import the CA certificate.

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SQL Server and Subversion

Bill — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 13:05:41 +0000

Two years ago I started supporting a Classic ASP application that used SQL 2000 for the data base. One of the complaints of the owner was that the previous person supporting the application did not keep track of program changes. The development environment was undocumented. A test system existed but it was in an unknown state with the production system. It looks like it was created from a restored backup. There was an old copy of SourceSafe and Visual Studio 2003 but I was pretty sure it was not being used. I could not find any commit logs. They had a source control system(SCS) but they had not used it. Initially I tried to like Sourcesafe and the Visual Studio 2003 environment but in a Classic ASP environment it does not bring a lot to the table. The work flow is slow and not very intuitive compared to Notepad++ and TortoiseSVN. Since this is a one man shop, I had some experience with Subversion, and we were not going to upgrade Sourcesafe, I installed Subversion, Notepad++, and TortoiseSVN. Next I synchronized the code for the production and development systems and made my initial load into Subversion. This was an adequate solution for the ASP, XSL, and XML files.

The data base documentation was not existent, too. So I used SQL Enterprise Manager to script all of the tables, stored procedures, functions and views. I loaded these files into Subversion, too. Within a very short period of time I adopted SQL Management Studio Express(SSMSE) as my testing environment for SQL changes. Here is where I ran into my first SCS conflict. SSMSE scripted the SQL objects slightly differently than SQL Enterprise Manager. I wanted to develop and test SQL changes using SSMSE but I wanted the ability to script all of the SQL objects using SQL Enterprise Manager at any time. I also found the scripts created by SQL Enterprise Manager to create tables were more trustworthy. My kludge solution was to manually apply the changes to the script files created by SQL Enterprise Manager every time I wanted to commit the changes. Using WinMerge this was not difficult but it was an extra step. I yearned for a more elegant solution.

On Friday I think I found it. It was not easy to find but it looks like I can make a significant upgrade to my development environment. I think I found it on the second or third Google page. The project resides on CodePlex.com and here is it’s description.

DBSourceTools is a GUI utility to help developers bring SQL Server databases under source control. A powerful database scripter, code editor, sql generator, and database versioning tool. Compare Schemas, create diff scripts, edit T-SQL with ease. Better than Management Studio.

Although it lists it’s status as beta, I installed it and scripted my data base without problems. Here are the features that attract me the most.

You can script the entire database including the data. I have not checked out the data scripting yet.
You can edit T-SQL in the same format as you used to script the entire data base if you use DBSourceTools as your editor. This should make it much easier for me to keep the source control system up to date.
If everything works as advertised this should be a relatively easy way to deploy new development systems. I have been promising to deploy a development system with updated table data for over a year. I really like the idea of deploying new systems as a way to verify the integrity of your source control system.

If I can compare schemas and create diff scripts, that’s frosting on the cake. As a SQL development environment it looks very promising and the documentation is remarkably good for a new project, too. Although it is a pain in the butt I started renaming my SQL subversion files(e.g. .PRC to .sql) on Friday. This will take a long time since I am renaming the files via the repo-browser. The SVN client rename is not a rename. It adds the file to the repository and you lose the history.

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Add a partition to Openfiler

Bill — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 15:49:23 +0000

I keep suffering from memory loss when it comes to using Openfiler. I use it so infrequently I keep forgetting how to add a partition to Openfiler. The user interface is not very intuitive so I keep recreating my steps. So I am posting this procedure as a reminder.

Click on the link, Volumes (https://filer:446/admin/volumes.html), in the navigation menu at the top of the page.
Click on the link, Block Devices (https://filer:446/admin/volumes_physical.html), in the navigation menu on the right side of the page.
To add a partition to the device, /dev/sda, click on the link, /dev/sda, under Edit Disk column.
At the bottom of the next page, Volumes : Block Devices : Edit Partitions, enter the data for the partition and click on the Create button.

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Event ID 7024 on SBS 2003 computer

Bill — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 00:14:01 +0000

If you get “The Certificate Service terminated with service-specific error 2148204801(0x800B0101)” you need to renew the certificate the certificate authority for your domain. If you are renewing a certificate for a self-signed domain, you can follow the procedure below. In my case the certificate is valid for 5 years.

Go to Admin tools > Certification Authority.
Highlight your server and right click. Then select All Tasks > Renew CA Certificate.
If everything works, you should be able to start the certificate service. Highlight your server and right click. Then select All Tasks > Start Service.

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