July 10, 2010 at 10:39 am · Filed under Uncategorized
As part of a new project I’ve been working on I’ve had to install and configure an Exchange 2007 server within my home network. I’ve managed to finally get delivery to both Exim and Exchange working, dependent on the address mail is being sent to. Exim works as both a smarthost for Exchange and an independent mail server.
So for example, lm @nothingbutreboots.com goes to Exim (and then onto Cyrus via LMTP), which can be accessed using RoundCube. However, mail to luke.morgan @nothingbutreboots.com gets passed to Exchange. Similarly, Exchange uses my Exim box as it’s smarthost for outbound mail.
Here’s a quick look at the relevant bits of the Exim config files which may give somebody trying to do a similar thing a few pointers:
send_to_smart_host:
debug_print = “R: attempting to send to Exchange”
driver = manualroute
domains = ad.nothingbutreboots.com
transport = remote_smtp
route_data = “ad.nothingbutreboots.com”
no_more
send_to_cyrus:
debug_print = “R: attempting to send to cyrus $local_part@$domain”
driver = manualroute
domains = zivi.nothingbutreboots.com
transport = LOCAL_DELIVERY
route_list = +local_domains
no_more
So then you have the relevant domain listings within your virtual folder, which the virtual router will then parse as above and decide which transport to send the mail onto:
July 10, 2010 at 10:09 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Following on from this post, it came to a point where I had to face facts – I had to completely reinstall IIS. IIS was working fine, but I was trying to install RSA’s web agent to allow OWA to be secured using SecurID, and the installer was insisting that IIS wasn’t installed. Even after (rather bashfully) running a batch script to register every DLL in the inetsrv folder, it still wasn’t right.
Finally, I decided to give up rooting around in the registry and just reinstall. This is somewhat of a trivial task on a ‘normal’ IIS server, but when you combine it with the half a dozen web apps that Exchange installs, it becomes a little more complex.
Luckily there’s a guide for doing exactly this over at Microsoft’s Support site. However, if you followed the guide and then got the following (all too common) error when trying to access Outlook Web Access (OWA):
Outlook Web Access did not initialize. An event has been logged so that the system administrator can resolve the issue. Please contact technical support for your organization.
This error is commonly caused by a permissions or authentication problem. First, ensure that the owa subdirectory (usually under the ‘Default website’ tree) within IIS Manager has the following authentication methods set:
OWA – Basic
8.1.240.5 – Enable anonymous access
auth – Enable anonymous access
Bin – Enable anonymous access
Current – Basic
forms – Basic
Help – Basic
smime – Basic
spell – Basic
Do an iisreset and try OWA again. If you’re still having problems, your IUSR accounts may have changed password during the reinstall, and IIS won’t be aware of the new ones. Follow this guide here, followed by an iisreset, and hopefully you should now have a functioning OWA.
February 7, 2010 at 5:11 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
I’ve been working on a website for the past few weeks, and as I’m reaching the final stages I’ve started to look at loading times and performance etc. The site uses quite a lot of jQuery and other AJAX libraries, but I was still shocked when I realised that over 500kB was being used just in Javascript!
Whilst the vast majority of the population are probably now on broadband, even I can’t forgive the homepage of this website totalling almost a 1MB download when images and the rafts of CSS are included.
So I’ve been making good use of YSlow, the excellent performance debugger produced by Yahoo, which runs within Firefox (as part of the excellent Firebug suite).
My initial score was as bad as I thought, with the index page receiving a ‘Grade E’. My first port of call was to fix the GZip compression on my Apache box, which involved putting the following in a .htaccess file in the root web directory (/var/www on my Ubuntu server).
# Below uses mod_deflate to compress text files. Never compress binary files.
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/css text/javascript text/xml image/svg+xml application/javascript application/x-javascript application/atom_xml application/rss+xml application/xml ap$
# Properly handle old browsers that do not support compression
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# Explicitly exclude binary files from compression just in case
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:exe|t?gz|zip|bz2|sit|rar)$ no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.pdf$ no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.avi$ no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.mov$ no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.mp3$ no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.mp4$ no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.rm$ no-gzip dont-vary
YSlow also complained that none of the page elements had expiry headers. Expiry headers are used by the browser in order know how long to cache an object for.
First of all, enable mod_expires:
#> a2enmod expires
And then put the following in your httpd.conf (/etc/apache2/httpd.conf):
ExpiresActive on
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 year"
You should be able to see that the above sets the expiry headers for the most common file formats, and sets them for one year in the future. You can modify this value as per your requirements, but be warned that YSlow complains if it isn’t “too far in the future”.
Finally, YSlow was complaining about ETags. ETags are explained thoroughly here, which can be summarised with: the majority of browsers use the “Last modified” header tag to validate components, and as such, ETags are largely redundant and as such they’re best turned off.
To do so, first enable mod_headers:
#> a2enmod headers
And then place the following in your site config file (i.e. /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/sitename):
Finally, all that was left to do was follow the remaining tips offered by YSlow, namely merge all the JScripts into one file, the same for CSS. And then run all the images through the excellent Smush.It.
Et voila! Grade: A
Google now offers there own performance analysis tool: Google Page Speed. Like YSlow, it tags on to the Firebug backend. Initial reports are mixed, but there’s a helpful comparison of both tools here.
January 13, 2010 at 4:11 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
For anyone who uses Synergy as much as me, you’re probably sad to see that it is no longer maintained, which means bugs that have for long gone unanswered will never get fixed unless you start looking at the code.
Alas, a new fork has been created – synergy+, which can be found over at their Google code project page.
Anyway, if like me you’re still using Synergy2 to share your keyboard and mouse between your Windows and Linux systems, you’ve probably come across the bug whereby the @ symbol on your Linux system (presuming Windows is your ‘server’) is replaced by the Greek Omega letter (Ω). A bug report exists over at the Launchpad site for Synergy2 detailing this problem, and thankfully somebody has posted a quick fix/hack for it.
