Category: Techspeak

I’ve used the POP3 Connector for Exchange which comes with Small Business Server since SBS version 4.0 (NT 4, Exchange 5.0). The main limitation I’ve always bumped into was the fact that the POP Connector will check mail only as frequently as every 15 minutes.
While this is normally acceptable, if a user is anxiously awaiting an email, or, as has frequently happened to me, you’re on the phone with someone and they email you a file so you can collaborate with them on it, waiting up to 15 minutes for the file can be a real time-waster.
The second issue, which I’ve never personally cared about, was the inability to leave an email which was downloaded on the server for a period of time. Many of my clients do this as a backup option (in case something gets corrupted or deleted after being downloaded), or as a poor substitute for IMAP, to allow them to receive their mail on multiple computers. Of course, given that they have an Exchange server, this is relatively pointless, but I digress.
Last week, I found the main reason why the POP Connector for Microsoft Exchange should be avoided at all costs. It is summarized in the following Microsoft Knowledgebase article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/842293/

SYMPTOMS

When the Microsoft Windows Small Business Server (SBS) 2003 Connector for POP3 Mailboxes component downloads e-mail messages from an Internet Service Provider (ISP) all the following symptoms may occur:

?	E-mail messages that are downloaded by the SBS 2003 Connector for POP3 Mailboxes are not successfully delivered to the intended recipients.
?	The Microsoft Exchange 2003 Server-based computer removes the e-mail messages that it was not able to deliver.
?	The senders of these e-mail messages do not receive non-delivery reports from the Exchange 2003 Server-based computer as they typically do if their e-mail messages do not reach the intended recipients.

To summarize, the POP Connector gets the message, determines that it doesn’t know what to do with the message, and silently throws it away.
Without any warning to the user. Or the server administrator. Or the sender of the original message.
Who was the rocket scientist who came up with this plan of action?!
I’ve been using IGetMail from the folks at Lockstep. It costs $69, and has a free trial. The program allows you to customize the polling schedule to your liking (including poll freqencies of less than every 15 minutes!). It also has more flexible handling of emails than the built in POP Connector, and can be configured to simply delete emails that are corrupted on the server. This feature has saved my clients a lot of troubleshooting time, especially in cases when certain Asian-language spam or a corrupted attachment has managed to really confuse the client and server, which would have caused a client to be unable to receive any email in the past.
If you’re using POP to pull your mail down to an Exchange server, I highly recommend IGetMail as an alternative to the built in POP Connector.

In the last month, I’ve had the following run-ins with failing hard drives:

• A local credit union had two teller stations in different offices die, and a third started to act up, but running SpinRite, chkdsk, and defrag seems to have fixed it.
• A local law office lost a drive in their server, as well as an external drive attached to their server. Today, about two weeks later, one of the lawyer’s workstation drives died as well.
• A client’s home PC had a drive failure.
• A client’s main Citrix server lost not one, but two drives in its RAID array.

All of these happened in separate towns (Bethel, Randolph, Rochester,? Rutland, and Woodstock, Vermont), in Dell computers, running a mix Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital hard drives. I’m no stranger to hard drive failures, but having so many fail all in such a short timeframe seems a bit odd. Anyone else experiencing this sort of behavior lately? If so, leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you.

If you don’t know what top-posting is, it is when you reply to someone’s email, and your response comes before the message to which you are replying.
This practice was popularized by Microsoft in their Outlook and Outlook Express email programs, whose default behavior is to include replies above the original message.
Allow me to demonstrate with an example I saw recently:

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A: No.
Q: Should I put my response to emails in the top of my reply?

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There you have it. Unfortunately, Microsoft Outlook, which is probably the most popular email client in the world, defaults to this setting. Obviously this is bad because if anyone wants to jump in to an existing conversation, s/he must scroll down to the first message (which is now conveniently located at the bottom of the email), read down to the bottom of this message, scroll back up to find the top of the immediately preceeding message, scroll down to read it, scroll back up to read the preceeding message, etc. Confusing, time-consuming, and, depending on your client, difficult to do.So please, make an effort and put your replies where they belong: after the thing you’re replying to.

Hm. Looks like I’m becoming an Ubuntu fan.

I love Firefox and Thunderbird. One of my favorite features of both is that they are available on the three platforms that I use on a daily basis: Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
The hardest part in moving your profiles from Windows to Mac (or Mac to Windows) is finding them in the first place. On Windows, I found my Firefox in C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles
where [username] would be your username.
I located my Thunderbird profile in C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Local Settings\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles.
Since I have a network, and Windows shares its system drives by default, the easiest way for me to connect the two systems to transfer the files was from my Mac. In Finder, I pressed Command-k and entered the path to my Windows machine’s hard drive, like so:
smb://[computername]/c$
where [computername] is the name of my PC. I was prompted for my Windows username and password, and then my Windows computer’s hard drive showed up on the desktop. From there it was a matter of just drilling down into the folders listed above to the Profiles directory.
Then, on the Mac, I had to locate the appropriate preferences folders. I opened my hard drive, then clicked on my username from the icon bar at the left. From there, I opened Library, Application Support, FireFox, Profiles. There I saw a profile named, in my case, ijawgk1.default. On Windows, the folder was named 9u4pqopm.default. The names are not important. What is important, is that you copy the contents of this folder on Windows into the folder on the Mac. Do not copy the whole folder – open the folder under your Profiles folder, select all files and folders underneath, and then copy all of them to the appropriate folder on the Mac. Restart Firefox or Thunderbird, and voila! You should see all of your customized settings, bookmarks, addresses, extensions, etc. on your Mac.
If you want to move your profile from Mac to Windows, simply reverse the copy, copying the contents of the profile from the Mac to Windows.
If you’re using Linux, you can do the same thing. You just need to know that your profiles are located in ~/.mozilla/firefox and ~/.mozilla-thunderbird.

After reading about Zabbix again in Linux Server Hacks, Vol. 2 I decided to take another stab at installing it. I had given it a shot a few months ago on an older Fedora box, and because of dependancy hell, gave up without getting it installed. So I figured I’d try again on my Ubuntu box.
The installation instructions on the Zabbix web site worked, but only after I installed some pre-requisites. Assuming you don’t yet have Apache2, PHP, and MySQL installed (which I did), you’d do the following:

sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 mysql-server mysql-common mysql-client

But we’re not quite ready to configure Zabbix yet. These are the obvious re-requisites. The ones that you can’t find so easily with the error messages you get back from running the configure command are installed with the following:

sudo apt-get install libsnmp9-dev net-snmp-devel libc6-dev libmysqlclient12-dev

These include libraries needed for snmp and MySQL connectivity. Once I put these in place, I was able to configure Zabbix with the following command:

/configure --enable-server --with-mysql --with-net-snmp