DogRiley - Your Network WatchDog

Postal address required post XP SP2 ?

2006-07-31T09:16:00.000-05:00

One wonders at their ability to last long term. Their business model is fundamentally challenged as is. In this day and age, a licensed and paying software customer should not have to rely on the US postal service to get software components that they own a license for.

Case in point, I have a Windows workstation (who doesn't), which runs a full cost client license for xp, one of the $300+ babies, not an OEM license. It runs fine, is serviceable, rarely crashes, etc. All the things you expect from a modern OS. Recently I required IIS server on it, as my old IIS dev server finally bit the big one.

No problem right? Just install IIS from the XP CD. Well here is the interesting problem which appears to require the US mail to address.

When I added my update to SP2 via the Windows update function I made my original CD essentially useless. I am unable to install IIS from the XP SP1 disk, as it is looking for newer SP2 files. I did some searching on Google and found I am not the first to encounter this. There is the SP2 update available via the MS Web Site.

I also found the ability to fix this issue (from Microsoft). IF you have both the SP1 CD AND the SP2 CD. (Just how many people is that in the world right now? I'm may be going out on a limb but the number is a very very small % or SP2 users). Here is where Microsoft's model is breaking, to get a copy of the SP2 update CD, I have to order one, pay for it to be delivered, and wait for the US post.

Since the client I am doing this for would laugh at the suggestion that we put the project on hold for a week while I wait for software to be delivered via the mail, I kept searching.

I then found some instructions on how to slipstream the downloaded copy of the SP2 patch into the SP1 files, and burn your own CD. This seemed far more reasonable. Although as you notice this is not a Microsoft KB article, so while this is possible, it is not something Microsoft wants you to know about.

After a long time, I ended up with a directory that for all intents and purposes was an XP SP2 CD. Good news right ? Wrong. The IIS installation routine would not accept the resulting directory which was XP with SP2 merged in via update.

Ugghhh, now remember, this is to install a software component that is part of the operating system I paid for, and paid good money for. Had this been open source software I could have downloaded the latest CD free of charge via the web, and would probably have found a troff of documentation outlining the process I would need to follow.

Microsoft does not make this type of download service available for paying customers because their software might be stolen, iow they do not trust their customers. Well who could blame them? But this is the heart of the problem they face in their next 5 years. How can you bill yourself as a business partner to someone it is clear you don't trust from your very basic interactions with?

Ultimately it turned out that there is an update to the security database that you can make to fix this issue. I could find no KB article from Microsoft on this method. In fact they do mention this tool, in their documentation on troubleshooting, but not with the /p switch which seemed to fix the issue.

This brings me to another challenge they face. Because the source is closed, their are a finite number of knowledgeable people to investigate and work on issues. This is one of the reasons that even after you pay $300+ for the program that makes your PC work (the OS), you have to pay another $250 to ask a question about why something doesn't work. This would be money you would pay in addition to your time waiting on hold, in a support queue, and explaining your issue to multiple helpdesk personnel. Many time they have solid 'English as a second language' skills, and very few technical skills other than searching the same knowledgebase you have access to.

Add to this they continue their monopoly on technical information about their closed product via their web site. Some portions of which don't work well in browsers from other companies, so if you use a Mac or Linux machine to search for answers you may find the articles which might contain the answers will not render your browser.....

All of this points to inefficiencies in their overall processes. Inefficiency raise costs, and ultimately these will be the costs that sink the ship as it is built today.

I wish Mr. Ozzie good luck with these challenges.

Hair Loss and Extensions (pt 2)

2006-02-09T21:40:00.000-05:00

(or how I learned to plug FrontPage Extensions into a Plesk subdomain)

-Part 2 (Read Part 1... The Madness)

How to add Frontpage extensions to a Plesk subdomain. This assumes you have the following created in Plesk:

1)Plesk domain, with Frontpage extensions enabled
2)One or more subdomains created in Plesk for the primary domain

Technical Details
Frontpage extensions are used by Microsoft applications to communicate, read and publish data to web sites. Details about them can be found here. It basically consists of:

Basic Frontpage environment:
1)Frontpage executables and configuration files, /usr/local/frontpage/
2)Web site directories, files, and .htaccess controls

If Frontpage is installed on the root directory then it is configured for the server, you just need to enable it for the individual domains. Plesk does it with their config utilities websrvmgr for the main domains, but their syntax does not seem to account for subdomains,

Here is the recipe:

1)Create a dummy domain (dd) in Plesk, and turn on Frontpage extensions, use the user name and password you want to use for your subdomain

2)change directories to the subdomain httpdocs directory

cd /home/httpd/vhosts/domain/subdomains/subdomain/httpdocs/

3)copy the following from the dummy domain:

cp -R /home/httpd/vhosts/(dd)/httpdocs/_vt* .
cp /home/httpd/vhosts/(dd)/httpdocs/_private/.htaccess private/.htaccess
cp -R /home/httpd/vhosts/(dd)/httpdocs/.htaccess .

4)Open the .htaccess file and edit the three lines for your environment:

AuthName (subdomain.domain)
AuthUserFile (path to the user password file) /home/httpd/vhosts/domain/subdomains/httpdocs/_vti_pvt/service.pwd
AuthGroupFile (path to group membership file) /home/httpd/vhosts/domain/subdomains/subdomain/httpdocs/_vti_pvt/service.grp

5)Save this file and copy these three lines. You will need to replace them in a number of starting .htaccess files.

6)Edit each of the .htaccess files. You can find them to make sure you don’ miss any

find . -name ‘.htaccess’

7)Edit each of these and replace the AuthName, AuthUserFile, and AuthGroupFiles with the proper entries you copies from when you edited the main .htaccess files.

Don’t change anything else in these files

8)Edit ‘_vti_pvt/access.cnf’ set the Realm and PasswordFile entries appropriately

Realm is subdomain.domain.com
PasswordFile is: /home/httpd/vhosts/domain/subdomains/subdomain/httpdocs/_vti_pvt/service.pwd

9)Change to the ‘_vti_pvt/ directory

10) chmod go+rw frontpg.lck

11)chown user:root service.cnf
(user is Plesk ftp username)

12)check all file ownership permissions, for all the files mentioned they should be owned by

user:psaserv

Once all these changes have been made the subdomain site has the files necessary, we just need to let apache and Frontpage know whats up.

In /usr/local/frontpage there are files for the parent domain, one in the conf directory and one in the root, we will need a pair of these for each subdomain we created. Copy the files and then we can edit them.

cp /usr/local/frontpage/domain:80.cnf /usr/local/frontpage/subdomain:80.cnf

cp /usr/local/frontpage/conf/domain.fp.80.cnf /usr/local/frontpage/subdomain.fp.80.cnf

The conf file is a httpd conf file excerpt. Edit it to make sense. ServerName, User, DocumentRoot and Directory should be altered appropriately

the :80.cnf file seems to be a pointer to the conf file. And if you notice primary domains (which also support www alias) have a linked files for the www. name. For subdomains you don’t need this.

The last change is to the httpd.include file.
In

/home/httpd/vhosts/domain/conf/httpd.include

you need to find the Directory section and duplicate it for the subdomain entry

You need to make a backup copy of this httpd.include file because it will be over written by Plesk. The other changes should not though.

So if you build the monster you need to automate the replacement of this file and restart of the httpd server.

Hair Loss and Extensions

2006-02-02T12:50:00.000-05:00

(or how I learned to plug Frontpage Extensions into a Plesk subdomain)

- Part 1

We use Plesk 7 to manage out hosting servers. I like its interface, it is easy to use, and I find my clients have few problems navigating it.

I recently had a new client with a primary domain and a few subdomains utilize our hosting services. It was our first hosting contract which involved subdomains and a large population of publishers using Microsoft products, including Frontpage, Word, and Excel to keep portions of their site updated.

During deployment of the site I realized that Plesk 7 doesn't support Frontpage extensions for subdomains. This was a disappointment, and we worked to try and enable functionality of the Microsoft Products using FTP as a methodology for file transfer. As usual we found that Microsoft supports their own methods better than standards and it became apparent that implementation of Frontpage extensions on the subdomains would make the editing, updating and management of the site easer.

I spent a bunch of time reading up on the Frontpage extensions, and especially as they related to Plesk, and specifically Plesk 7. There is not a lot of detail. I found a great Frontpage support resource, and details on installing from scratch on a Linux/Apache server. Unfortunately that is not exactly what I needed. Plesk does some strange things, like has its own suexec etc. So we needed to fit into that system.

Further research yielded a way to manually clean an installation that is not behaving, and this lead me to realize that the extensions are not all that foreign, They are just a bunch of directories, .htaccess, executable and configuration files. I created a blank test domain and traced the files and directories created and came up with a recipe that worked for me.

Caveats/Warnings:

If you edit the web site settings in Plesk after you make these changes, Plesk will overwrite your changes to the domain httpd.include file
If you reboot the server Plesk will overwrite the changes to the domain httpd.include file
File ownership and permissions are critical, pay careful attention
I did not spend the time to script recreation of the environment in the event of corruption
If you follow these instructions in a production environment without first testing them you deserve the lynching you get, and don't blame me.

Considerations:

You may want to remove FTP access after this because all management can be accomplished through Frontpage, and ftp users can corrupt files. To do this clear the FTP password in Plesk
Be sure and test your changes and familiarize yourself with the files and structures before going to a live environment

Ok enough gas bagging..... Part 2 will be coming up next...

Dark Fiber, Sonicwall, PPOE and Macs

2006-01-28T14:11:00.000-05:00

Recently a client of mine had the opportunity to get a Fiber Optic connection to his office. Verizon in many areas is making this service, called FiOS available. They certainly can provide a lot of services with this type of bandwidth. Phone, internet and video are their current focus it seems.

Anyway, we cut over the internet connection, which in this case is handled by a Sonicwall TZ170. It was connected to a cable modem using DHCP and running NAT and we switched to a PPOE connection with credentials again NAT'ing. We set the MTU to 1490 and told the Sonicwall to fragment outgoing packets as necessary. Checked connection from the windows server, worked great, desktops great. And I thought we were done, another routine day.

Well you know how that goes, anytime it seems too easy there is always a tiger lurking.

This time is was the Mac's. Yep the Tiger OS was waiting to pounce. It seems that the Macs connected, and could ping hosts, but web sites and mail were not working. Actually web sites with little content like say Google worked fine, but cnn.com or apple.com did not. The bad sites would start to load, but never finish, usually hanging on large graphics....

Turns out the Macintosh machines Ethernet interfaces (both airport and Ethernet) are set to a mtu of 1500 and for some reason the Sonicwall was not able to fragment the packets on the way out. Changing the mtu to 1490 with ifconfig:

ifconfig en1 mtu

This seemed strange and inconvenient. And while I have a familiarity with Macintosh machines of all types, I have not spent much time with OSX. I can survive the experiences because of all the years of linux/unix. I tried to get the machines to set their interfaces via an rc.local type of approach, but it wasn't working like BSD the way I remember it. So I visit Apple with one of the windows machines and find a super helpful doc that outlines how to set the mtu via a Startup Script. In my opinion they have the startup methodology worked out well, it's very organized, and seems very reliable.

As for the issue with the Sonicwall, I've notified Sonicwall of the issue and they are looking into it.

I have a sneaky suspicion that the Windows machines were not using an mtu of 1500, I swear I remember reading an article about windows mtu somewhere that mentioned windows has a low default frame size. I was unable to find this document tho. If you know I'd love to hear from you.

Anyway, it won't bee too long before my next post.

Till Next Time,

Sean Riley
President, DogRiley

FileZilla and Windows FTP

2005-10-20T08:48:00.000-05:00

Well, in the Windows world, graphical FTP clients were often a sore spot. Good ones cost money (ala WS-FTP etc.) , and free ones that were useful were elusive.

Look no further. FileZilla is here. It's a sourceforge project, and I have been using it for about the last month. It is awesome. It's easy to setup, and use, and has all the features you need in a ftp client.

If you are looking for ftp on windows, check it out.

Now Microsoft Windows has 'Network Places' that can be used for some ftp duties, but I have found this to be problematic especially with large transfers, and it's lack of resuming transfers. To be fair to Windows, the Mac still lacks solid ftp support. For our Mac friends tho CyberDuck has proved to be a solid client and they may want to check it out.

Till Next Time,

Sean Riley
President, DogRiley

Remote Web Workplace error

2005-09-29T10:59:00.000-05:00

Boy it has been a while since my last update. Vacations in August and busy beginning to September can do that.

Ran into an issue with a client, connecting remotely with Remote Web Workplace, getting a strange error. When connecting to the server all would go fine until he chose a machine to connect to and clicked connect. At that point a strange error would pop up preventing him from connecting.

Line: 272
Char: 4
Error: Invalid procedure call or argument
Code: 0
URL: https://fqdn.com/Remote/tsweb.aspx?

After some looking I found that the issue is related to the screen display size. If you go into the options drop down and choose 1024x768 as the screen resolution the problem resolves itself. I will have to look and see why this issue affected the user in this particular situation and not in other locations.

SmallBizServer.Net gets the shout for the assit in the problem resolution.

Till Next Time,

Sean Riley
President, DogRiley

sqlservr.exe high memory usage for SBSMonitoring process

2005-08-23T08:11:00.000-05:00

This seems to be a common issue with my SBS2003 installs. The administrative user will get an E-mail entitled: Allocated Memory Alert on 'ServerName' which directs you to the process table to find the culprit. In most of my cases I see two hogs. store.exe (Exchange) and sqlservr.exe. We will cover the issues surrounding store.exe in a later post, but for know here are my finding for the sqlservr.exe process. I found the fix in this thread on winserverhelp.com.

First verify that the sqlservr process at fault is in fact the SBSMonitoring one. First open Windows Task Manager, choose the processes tab, click the view menu and choose Select Columns. Check the PID column. This will show you the process ID of the entries in the process table. Sort this list by Mem Usage column and get the PID of the offending sqlservr.exe process. The to confirm the PID is SBSMonitoring at a command prompt type:

tasklist /svc

Look for the PID that matches your memory hog. It will look something like this. My PID was 376:

sqlservr.exe 376 MSSQL$SBSMONITORING

If this is the case, you can alter the memory settings for SBSMonitoring process with the following commands from the command line. (Thanks to David Copland)

osql -E -S servername\sbsmonitoring

sp_configure 'show advanced options',1
reconfigure with override
go
sp_configure 'max server memory', nnnn
reconfigure with override
go

My session looked like this:

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator>osql -E -S file-server\sbsmonitoring
1> sp_configure 'show advanced options',1
2> reconfigure with override
3> go
DBCC execution completed. If DBCC printed error messages, contact your system
administrator.
Configuration option 'show advanced options' changed from 0 to 1. Run the
RECONFIGURE statement to install.
1> sp_configure 'max server memory',100
2> reconfigure with override
3> go
DBCC execution completed. If DBCC printed error messages, contact your system
administrator.
Configuration option 'max server memory (MB)' changed from 2147483647 to 100.
Run the RECONFIGURE statement to install.
1> quit

I set my server to use a maximum of 100MB of memory, and so far all seems well with it. I am planning on adding this to the normal maintenance cycle for all of our supported SBS2003 servers.

Till Next Time,

Sean Riley
President, DogRiley

rdesktop rocks

2005-08-10T08:06:00.000-05:00

As you who follow this blog know we support both Linux and Windows for our clients. Utilizing each for their strengths.

As part of the rebuild for my laptop, I partitioned it with Windows XP and Fedora Core 4. I have been using Fedora Core 4 on it almost exclusively. After I went through the pain of converting all my outlook mail, tasks and address book into a non proprietary format it seems silly to go back to putting that into a container that only 1 computer can utilize. So as to date I have not gone back to using Word, Excel, or Outlook, on any of my machines, and have not missed it. I do some work for clients in Access and as such have not found an alternative for it, so I continue to use it as necessary.

However I do need frequently to access Windows machines either on my network or at client sites. For this I have a Windows desktop that works great, but if I am on the laptop I have been shutting down and rebooting into XP. This as you can imagine is a pain.

I know that Microsoft makes an RDP client for the Mac, so I thought I would see if anyone has made a Terminal Services client for Linux. Of course they do :) Its a sourceforge project and a stable released version. Woot ! rdesktop works great for quick and dirty access to my windows remote desktop clients and terminal servers.

rdesktop -fzb

Thanks to the rdesktop team for making Linux even better !

Till Next Time,

Sean Riley
President, DogRiley

SBS 2003 and APC java runtime

2005-08-05T15:31:00.000-05:00

Today I ran into an issue that caused me to reboot a production machine. It pained me to do it, but I wasn't given a choice.

Anyway, during the reboot sequence, as Windows 2003 is loading, it would get to

applying computer settings

and would hang there.

From a workstation I was able to get to the shares, and Exchange was running, but I couldn't get the console session to load. I tried remote console it was down too. I was able to get into remote computer management. The events logs did not show anything strange, so I started looking for an answer.

Luckily I found this at SBSBLOG. Turns out that the APC Powerchute must be upgraded to 7.0. So boot into safe mode and disable the APC services, this will allow for console to load.

I have to give props to SBSBlog, it has helped out many times with great and timely info on Microsoft's SBS platform.

For those running APC, it's time to get on 7.0.

Will be doing the upgrade this weekend......

Its back........

2005-08-01T10:05:00.000-05:00

My laptop finally arrived from Gateway. It had originally arrived over a week ago, but I was waiting for a new hard drive. The original one was only 40GB, and I wanted to load Fedora Core on it and dual boot Windows XP, so I got myself a 60GB drive for under $100. Once I got the new drive I set out to build the Operating Systems.

The first time the unit came back though there was some type of short in the system. As soon as I picked it up after building the OS's I noticed it. Anytime you tapped the keyboard or picked it up, the unit would shut off. So it got shipped back to Gateway for a second tour of the repair bench. This time they replaced a lot of stuff, and the unit is now back and working. Huzzah !

This post is being done under the FC4 installation. I had a little difficulty with the wireless set up, I have it working but not sure I understand they whys of the current configuration. I found a number of good resources during the set up but the best by far is Fedora Core 4 installation Notes, by Stanton Finley. It covers much of the application set-up issue that you run into, and was a great resource.

As for the issue related to the wireless card, which is orinoco_cs based. I found the answer on bugzilla, but still unsure of the reason behind having the wireless connection aliased.

Till Next Time,

Sean Riley
President, DogRiley

Fedora Core 4

2005-07-30T16:19:00.000-05:00

I finished my second upgrade to Fedora Core 4. Not everything is ironed out yet with the build of course. But one thing is for sure a lot has happened to the RedHat I knew before.

I must say of all the changes, for me the nicest addition is the new SELinux extensions. For deep background on the reasons for and theory of SELinux read, The Inevitability of Failure: The Flawed Assumption of Security in Modern Computing Environments

The more I work with SELinux the more I realize I need to know about it, and how exactly it does all its stuff. It certainly changes things relating to users, directories and access. As I am starting to learn it, I'm sure I'm doing things the hard-way. :)

The major difference, so far for me, in Red Hat's SELinux is the way ftp is handled. vsftpd is still the server which is great. However, it seems to be designed to run as a daemon rather than invoked via xinet.d. If you grab a working copy of the xinet.d file for vsftpd you can invoke it via xinet.d wrapper. I did my first server upgrade in this manner. The current one I am trying as a daemon. I certainly think I will miss some of the features that the xinet.d wrapper brings, and may yet return to it.

Of all the issues I saw most notable is if you want to enable chroot directory's outside of the normal /home/xxx vsftpd. These will fail with a

500 OOPS: cannot change directory: /mnt/xxxxx

I was able to use ftp if I logged in with an account with a directory in /home, but once I set a user account to have a home drive outside of /home (in this case on a mounted secondary disk) vsftpd barfs the above.

I found information at the NSA that indicates you can disable SELinux protection of the ftp daemon.

setsebool -P ftpd_disable_trans 1

This seems a bit drastic. It certainly works for now though.

I think ultimately the issue resides with policies, but as SELinux policies are new to me, it will take time before it all gets sorted out. As I spend time with the new SELinux extensions in Fedora Core 4 I will keep you updated on my thoughts and configuration lessons.

Till Next Time,

Sean Riley
President, DogRiley

Node-Runner Network Monitoring

2005-07-29T20:13:00.000-05:00

I had been using a quick and dirty perl based network monitor called penemo for some of my clients sites. Now mind you this is not mission critical Tivoli type monitoring and correlation, just a way for me to stay ahead of my clients. Recently the penemo developers site has lapsed so I thought I would try a new project.

I was looking for something new, and came across node-runner. It is php based, has web based configuration and reporting screens, and uses MySQL as a back end.

The installation scripts did not work for me, but the README and INSTALL files have all of the manual steps to handle the work. I found that when installing node-runner it is best to keep the basic file structure intact in a /usr/local/node-runner directory. This means keep etc, include, contribs, sql all under here.

I had tried to split the stc stuff into /usr/local/etc, but never got that running right.

Then you move the web files to the server, and create a cron job for the php polling application, edit the conf files with the proper path locations and you should be good to go.

The application seems to be running well, php strict generates a bunch of errors about variables that are not initialized but nothing that halts operation.

It has options for mailing groups for outage notifications, options to add users, and the ability to check servers using ICMP, TCP, UDP, HTTP, and SNMP. I have only tried HTTP, ICMP, and TCP to date, but have had no issues.

I will keep you updated.

Till Next Time,

Sean Riley
President, DogRiley

Spam, sp4m, sp@m, $p@m, and amspay

2005-07-28T20:08:00.000-05:00

Top spammer obfuscated words: (-from sophos)

cialis
orgasms
viagra

LOL, made me laugh, Daily we deal with large volumes of the stuff, and dealing with spam is messy business, but spamassassin can make it easier. The Bayesian filter with a little training on good mail (HAM) and bad mail (SPAM) does awesome work.

I still laugh when I read some of the messages, I just have a hard time believing anyone able to work a computer would be taken by such obvious flim flam.

Anyway,

Enjoy

Clam AntiVirus FSG File Processing Overflow

2005-07-27T08:45:00.000-05:00

Don't worry, not turning this into a security bulletin blog :) But there is an issue with clamav.

We do use ClamAV on a bunch of our systems. I have found it to work great, and we use it as a first line of defense in many client situations, allowing us to drop virus laden E-mail's early in the incoming mail route.

If you haven't run it, I would recommend it, the virus list is large, response times for new signatures is tops, and freshclam will ensure that your definitions stay up to date. It allows you to submit viruses easily, and even add your own (there is a good tutorial in pdf found from antionline.com).

If anything interesting comes during the patching I will surely let you know.

Till next time:
Sean Riley
President, DogRiley

RedHat up2date and Plesk

2005-07-21T12:56:00.000-05:00

We run Plesk on our hosting servers at DogRiley. We chose it because the interface it offers our clients for managing aspects of their domains is quite nice. While Plesk has a nice interface upgrades to the base OS and to Plesk itself can be challenging and problematic. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the business, security updates for operating systems are something that cannot be avoided and we take them seriously.

So......

During a recent up2date session I learned a few tricks about how to better deal with the interaction of Plesk and RedHat, and thought I would cover them here, in case someone else can learn from them.

When running a normal up2date session I like to always test the environment by doing a dry run:

up2date –dry-run

it is a good way to get a feeling for any challenges you may be facing. Pay close attention to any dependency problems. Up2date is good, but sometimes it doesn't solve all your dependencies. When running up2date make sure that you have configured the pkgSkipList to exclude packages. Run

up2date –configure

and option 9 will allow you to add to the skip list. Normally for servers I have kernel* in there to prevent kernel upgrades. These I will do at seperate times and based on security issues that demand an upgrade, not just because a new kernel is out.

On our last up2date run we discovered 2 issues with the upgrade that affected our operations. The first was with the rpm packages. When rpm and its associated packages rpm, rpm-python, rpm-devel, rpm-libs and rpm-build get upgraded you run into an issue with Plesk 7. After the upgrad Plesk will no longer accept any logins to the control panel, it will complain about

“Unable to exec utility packagemng: packagemng: Unable to open rpm db: cannot open Packages using db3 - (-30982) “

A short term fix I found was to delete the __db.00* files that reside in /var/lib/rpm.

rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db*

This allows Plesk logins again, but it causes an issue with rpm or up2date, they are unable to read the rpm database. To fix this issue you can delete the __db.00* files again and run

rpm –rebuilddb

You can then run up2date and rpm, but you cannot log into Plesk. I eventually found that by returning to an older revision of the rpm programs rpm-4.2.3-10 I was able to resolve this issue, and run both Plesk and up2date without any problems. So we now have excluded rpm* with up2date –config on all of our Plesk hosting servers.

The second issue I found with Plesk is that during the update process suexec was upgraded to a newer version. This in itself didn't present a problem until a client who uses FrontPage extensions called. It turns out that Plesk is fussy about suexec, and uses a special version called psa-suexec, when pas-suexec and suexec get out of sync a symptom is that FrontPage extensions stop working. Simply copy suexec to another file like suexec.original and then copy the existings psa-suexec to suexec.

cp /usr/sbin/psa-suexec /usr/sbin/suexec

This restores all of the necessary functionality for FrontPage extensions to work fine.

We will soon be doing the Plesk upgrade from Plesk 7 to Plesk Reloaded, I have read that there are some challenges with this, and of course will share what we learn with you all.

Till next time:
Sean Riley
President, DogRiley

Exchange Server and Extended Server Usage Report

2005-07-18T11:50:00.000-05:00

I have had some issues with the default reporting that Microsoft provides with Small Business Server 2003. The Extended Reports have often shown unusually high numbers of messages sent at my various clients. After a talk with an employee at a client site regarding a very unusually high number of messages sent (over 6K) I decided to nail it.

Recently I spent some time looking into the issue. I became concerned that maybe the servers or SMTP server was being compromised. First I looked into relay, and tested to make sure that relay's were disabled. I can never remember the syntax for the telnet session to the mail server so I keep this page book marked. That yielded no results which was a good sign, I then tried to authenticate and send, thinking maybe the server was allowing authenticated remote connections, and we had a compromised password. Again nope.

After these fairly quick checks it was time to play the goggle game. After a few searches and refining terms I found that there is a know bug in usage reporting tool, and how it counts E-mails. A single message to 4 recipients in 4 different domains ends up being counted as 16 outgoing mail messages (scratches head on that).

Anyway, hopefully this will help those out there who are seeing the same results in their reports.

You are reviewing your server reports right ?

Till next time:
Sean Riley
President, DogRiley

Calendar

2005-07-17T21:42:00.000-05:00

Well Thuderbird is doing great !

However, I just realized though that all of my calendar entries needed to be moved over from Outlook. Ugghhh.

Got to whip out the Outlook disk, and reinstall Outlook. After this I look into the import to Calendar, and it wants a delimited text file from Outlook. No problem. I go into Outlook, set it as default again (it really isn't happy unless it is number 1) attach my old pst files. I hit File - Import and Export - Choose Export to File (Windows) and lo and behold a translator is not installed. Whip out the disks again, and install the translator. This enables me to get my calendar out to a CSV file, thinking my tasks will be needed too I export them as well.

When importing to Calendar I get a strange javascript error, but then things look OK, it asks me to map fields from Outlook to Calendar it seems to guess right, when I import all looks well.

I tried the import of tasks and would advise against it. It drops the entries in as calendar events which isn't very helpful. Mozilla mentions that Outport exists, but I didn't have enough tasks and the inclination at this time to play with it.

Till next time:
Sean Riley
President, DogRiley

Outlook and Thunderbird:

2005-07-15T12:09:00.000-05:00

I needed access to my E-mail from my failed laptop hard drive, and Thunderbird could import from Outlook, so I thought I was good to go.

Well, if you have ever needed to recover outlook messages you will know that you can't if you don't have Outlook. Even Outlook Express needs Outlook's MAPI files to access the address book and e-mail folders under Outlook. Thunderbird complained there was no Outlook on my machine to import from. So I was stuck, kind of. I needed access to Outlook, but I didn't have a license on the running machine.

So I bent the rules. I installed Outlook on my new desktop, created my profile, and then attached the old pst files via: File - Data File Management. Outlook gives you 50 starts without registration so you don't have to worry about that nightmare. Once attached Thunderbird was able to import the contents of my address book, and all mail folder fine. Woohoo !

Now all that was left was to remove Outlook from my machine.

I started using Thunderbird, and frankly liked the interface, options and controls. But I got a call from a client and suddenly I needed to make an appointment in my calendar.....

But there was not a calendar. So I hit mozilla.org and started looking around. Boy they have a bunch of cool extensions. But no obvious calendar. The have all the calendar stuff here. You need to download the calendar code for Thunderbird and then include it using the Tools – Extensions menu. Then add it to the tool bar so it is handy ( View Toolbar – Customize )

So I'm off and running, Thunderbird as default mail client, and Calendar for my schedule and To Do lists.

Till next time:
Sean Riley
President, DogRiley

The push over the edge

2005-07-14T12:54:00.000-05:00

It finally happened......

I got back late from a long weekend, flipped open my laptop and proceeded to check my mail. Its startup was strange, first the CPU fan came on hard, no post beep and none of the normal startup light sequences. Hmmm... taking a deep breath, I held the on button until it shut down and tried it again.

This time the startup proceeded normally, I got to log into Windows XP and started Outlook. As soon as Outlook loaded the display went crazy, and all I could see was multicolored vertical lines. I played with it some more (holding my breath) but results were poor.

It finally happened, my 3 year old Gateway Laptop was toast.

This thing served me well, it goes everywhere with me, and although it has suffered no abuse, it's life has not been cushy. The folks at Gateway were nice on the phone, for a reasonable cost they are replacing the motherboard in the unit, and will get it back to me sometime in the next 10-15 business days....... yikes....

I had foreseen this event happening, and bought a new desktop for Christmas to handle Quickbooks and other crucial parts of my business, so luckily I had a machine. I was also able to pick up a small 2.5” drive housing that I could put the Laptop's hard drive in while the system was repaired, so my data was available to me. But what about applications ?

Well applications are the problem aren't they. They tend to add the most expense to any computer system these days, and so on the new desktop I had opted out of the expensive Microsoft Office Suite, and had been using Open Office whenever I needed to touch a spreadsheet or word processing document. Which to this point was rare. But so far I have produced a few documents and spreadsheets this week, and have exchanged them with clients without incident.

Probably the thorniest issue I had to work through was E-mail. Having used Outlook exclusively for the last 3 years I had a considerable about of important stuff in Outlook pst files. Well Thunderbird to the rescue (sort of)........

Next post I'll cover my Outlook -> Thunderbird issues and solutions. And will continue to post about my experiences with Open Office as my time w/o MS Office continues.

Till next time:
Sean Riley
President, DogRiley

More Large company antics

2005-07-13T09:01:00.000-05:00

First Post.........

Feeling like chattel today. I used to be an AT&T wireless customer. We all know they were bought by Cingular a while ago. So after dealing with the issues of my company plan not mapping directly to the new Cingular billing system, and resulting overages (which is a whole other story) I run into this....

I come to find out recently that my pager service at xxxxxxxxx@mobile.att.net stopped working. It worked fine for a while after the merger, and then suddenly stopped. I use this service in business so equipment at client sites can contact me where there is a problem. So I finally get the time to call Cingular and traverse the voice mail jail to get to customer service to find out what my new address is. 3 calls, involving 2 random disconnects, and I get an answer to my simple question "What is my new pager address for E-mail delivery?" Silly me not to try it with the rep on the phone. Turns out it is the wrong answer. Another call through voice mail jail and finally I get and test the correct answer. For those who care: xxxxxxxxxx@mmode.com is the correct answer.

So why is it that 2 super large telecommunications companies can't set up a simple E-mail forwarding for addresses on the AT&T system mapping to new Cingular addresses? Or transfer the mobile.att.net domain to Cingular until all AT&T customers contracts run out? It doesn't seem technically challenging, and would be great transparent customer service. It seems that 4 calls from tons of subscribers to technical support is easier. It took close to an hour of my time to deal with getting a simple answer. And a bunch of time and effort on theirs to provide the support.

My customers would never accept this type of technical snafu, but we the consumer are growing more and more like chattel that are sold, bartered, and traded. We moo our way through the voice mail mazes to our slaughter.

Till next time:
Sean Riley
President, DogRiley