a n d r e a s . s c h u t z

Every one that knows me well enough, or even not that well, knows that I have strong dislikeings towards microsoft. Well I can tell you that it didn’t get better today.

The company I am working for right now have customers that buy, among many other things, e-mail. An old and straight forward service that have worked after certain standards in well over twenty years.

A certain “overhead” have to be tolerated to keep services safe. Http had to become https, ftp evolved to sftp. Every year we have been forced to implement a new saftey layer to deal with the new exploits.

Ofcourse e-mail have not been left untouched by this. And spammers and spoofers have made their contribution to darwinize e-mail services. But all in all, we still are able to use e-mail as a every day service. Hell, companies even rely on it.

Rely on it?
Yes, rely on it… but wait, listen, you hear that? You hear how that make an echo?

I have a dozen of customers turning to me for help saying; We can’t e-mail @hotmail.com, @live.com or @msn.com. Sure, I have a coupple of cases with @gmail.com also. But guess who is leading the club? I’ll give you one shot… who?

Let’s say that you have a small company. Of course you don’t have your own IT departement, you don’t even have your own servers. Apart from your laptop, you buy all your IT as service from someone that knows how that stuff works. Someone like my company. Business is a struggle but all in all works out well in the end of the month.

Now the war against spammers hit you!

Overnight you are no longer able to e-mail 80% of your customers. No longer can you continue to answert to those e-mail relations representing good business and your reputation. Maybe you where cut off in the middle of a negotiation… you just dropped out.

Well, you, little company, must ofcourse understand that this is for your own safety, you must have your e-mail blocked because we have to fight cybercrime. Just like you have to accept to get underessed every time you fly or have your handbag searched every time that bomb dog sniffs on you or any authority representant says that his dog probably looked like it wanted to sniff on you. Obey! Because you don’t want your kids to be blown up do you? DO you???

————–

For two days now I have tried my hardest to get in contact with Mircosoft. What a joke!
And for two days now I have read the postings on support.microsoft.com, even a bigger joke! Never underestimate stupid people in large groups. Impervious!

You know what, I don’t hink I can revert those blacklistings, and you know what? I don’t think I am supposed to be able to revert them. You hear that echo again?

But what I DO think is, this is business. I think that this is the same foul business tactic selling insurance (you don’t want your kids to be hurt, do you?) or any other aid business pleading for charity. Look at those hungry kids, you want them to die?

Not that I don’t like charity, but when you dress up Global business in charity, i get sick!

Maybe this is a good moment for reflection.
What created this situation? How did they get their (or shoud I say your) money? How did they get so big and powerful? Are there alternatives? Does this imply other business segments too (local butcher – the mall)?

So maybe it’s time to contemplate and try to take som steps in the right directions?
Nah… I wasn’t me getting locked out this time……

Never underestimate fools in a pack.

Just thought I would put down how I solved the problem with sending email from multiple accounts on the same server yesterday.

First a description of the problem I was faced with.

A client wanted to hook up several email accounts to the same email client. Nothing strange with that, it happens every day. What maybe was a little unique in this case was that some of the email accounts resided on the same server.

I like to believe that the most common situation is that people tie different email accounts from different ISP’s together, and doing that, chances are that they never encounter this problem. Anyhow, I searched Google extensively, and not one of the hits addressed this problem.

My client used a MacBook Air with Lion installed. And the application used is Mail 5, perhaps not one of the best applications that Apple have released. Let’s hope it will develop.

When all the different email accounts was set up, they all recieved email properly, but only the account that was set up first could send something. Emails from all the other email accounts got stuck when trying to send, forward or reply.

So what was the solution to this problem?

Send, forward and reply all make use of the SMTP servers. And what maybe isn’t obvious when you use different email accounts on the same server, is that you need to authorize to the SMTP (sending) server witht the same account that your IMAP or POP (recieveing) functionality is using. That gives, you have to create an SMTP entry that matches your IMAP (or POP) entry. So for every recieving email account you have to create an sending account too.

This paired with some issues in the setup wizards on Apples email client does not give you a logical and straight forward setup. I had to go through the settings over and over again. Filling in the same passwords time after time. The little invention “show password” that android makes use of would have been very handy here. Given how stubborn this setup was, I can almoust swear that the setup wizard mixes accounts and passwords, and that you have to go in and straight this up later.

Well, now it works like a charm.

The different email accounts recieve and send flawlessly. And I have learned to keep a one-to-one relatioship between incoming and outgoing email accounts.

Hi again!

So for some days now I have been testing open SuSE 11.2. Found some party tricks I would like to share to save you other some hassle. But first of all I must really send my appreciations to the SuSE team. Darn, I think you made it again! 10.3 was good, this is excellent!

First, if you do have a network that acts up when you try to packet scale (i do have those subnets at work), before you try any network traffic leave the graphical installation with ctrl + alt + F2 and type “echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_window_scaling” to disable packet scaling. Then simply return to the graphics with alt+F7 and continue.

Second. If you, like me, have an HP Pavilion DV7 vith a NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT adapter inside. Download the driver from NVIDIA’s site and install it. That will make it possible to have all the new eye candy activated.

Third. Add the “enable_msi” with an value of “1” to get your sound card running without the jitter.

To add mp3 support and get a fully functional media player follow the suggestions here:
http://lizards.opensuse.org/2009/09/12/11-2-64-bit-and-mp3/

I added Skype yesterday and downloaded the SuSE package from their site. I had to add 32-bit QT to get i running, but that was pretty obvious from the error codes once you started it from the terminal.

I will add tricks here when I discover them.

Till then.

My laptop needed to be renewed. More and more of our lab environment has moved into our computers, and the ability to run virtual machines on our portable platforms has made the urge for a more powerful laptop bigger.
Thus I bought a new laptop!
After browsing and cruising I settled for a HP Pavilion DV7 1095eo. My idea is to document the “quirks” here so that others can benefit from my misstakes and victories.

This is a picture of the machine.

The specs of the machine is somewhat like this:
* dual core 2.53 GHz 64 bit
* 4 Gig of ram
* 17″ display
* fingerprint reader
* wifi card
* 2 x 250 Gb HD
* web cam
* IR remote

The machine comes with VISTA HOME EDITION. Well…hey…!
After wipeing the machine clean I installed SuSE 11.0, after all I do have very good experience of SuSE linux. Bearing in mind that this is a .0 release I was quite happy that almost everything worked out of the box, but four things; sound, fingerprint reader, remote and wireless nic.

— UPDATE —
Today I got my soundcard working. After finding similar errors and the fixes to them in the UBUNTU forum. It seams that I have to give the ALSA driver ‘snd-hda-intel.ko’ the enable_msi=1 option in /etc/modprobe.d/sound file. This enables ‘Message Signaled Interrupt’ a fairly new way of ‘soft’ interrupts. Actually my first guess was interrupt problems. Without this option the sound locks in an everlasting stuttering loop and totally blocks the sound device. Only way to shut down sound is to restart the soundsystem with ‘rcalsasound restart’. This is how my /etc/modprobe.d/sound looks like after adding the option:

—————-
alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel
alias sound-slot-0 snd-hda-intel
options snd-hda-intel enable_msi=1
—————-

Yast2 made it all but the option line.

*** UNDER CONSTRUCTION ***

Lately I have been designing different technologies for the school here on Gotland. We are, after a bunch of years, finally stitching the administrative and the educational part of Gotlands kommun together.

The project is named MERIT, and it is a fairly large IT-project for Gotlands kommun. Running over more than three years and spending more than 8M SKr it is somewhat of a monster. But it gives a new and at least for me, very welcome attitude to what IT can be used to achieve.

Aiming quite high we will try to use “bleeding edge” technology for our solutions. This include:

* MS Vista
* Zenworks 10
* Groupwise 7.5
* OES2 on SLES 10
* 802.1x
* NIM 3.5
and some other newly released stuff.

The last week I have spent some time trying to get MAC’s Leopard to play together with eDirectory 8.8 on Linux. The sad part of this is that I found nothing or very little information from the manufacturers to aid you in this. A search on google didnt render much, but finally I found theese links. Ofcourse, if anyone have better, newer or more user friendly information or workflows than theese rather ancient ones, feel free to drop a comment.

Novell cool solutions.
Novell forum.
Macenterprise.org

Hey Mac and Novell, wake up!
My search on the net gave me some old tips and tricks that had to be modernized and somewhat altered. Here I will try to give you an up to date workflow on my achievements.

The steps that have to be done roughly breaks down to:
* Expand eDirectorys schema to hold the objectclasses and attributes that Leopard needs to function.
* Import the template you need to make the attribute mapping on the Leopard client, and set it up for LDAP.
* Populate theese attributes with data that means anything to Leopard.

Lets make it a little more verbose.

Expand eDirectorys schema
This can be done in different ways, but i will describe the way I choosed. From the Macenterprise link above you can download their newest package (2004-10 … !) with info and tools. This is the best thing I have found, and it contains a pdf with information, some not so very functional ldif files and some outdated installationpackages for the MAC client. Anyhow, as I said, this is the best I have found. I downloaded and extracted it, well almost.
I am running Linux and ARK did not extract the files in a correct way. But I was able to extract the pdf and read more about how someone (the document does not say, but it sure look NOVELL-ish) in 2004 says that it should be done.
The document is very good and gives clear information of all steps. And like the document states, I extracted the ldif file applev2.ldf for UNIX since I am on a Linux machine. Then the document tells you to use a wizard in Novells ConsoleOne to update the schema with the applev2.ldf file.
That did not work for me. Every time I tried to do as perscribed, ConsoleOne shut down and died on me. Since ConsoleOne can be configured with hundreds of “snapins” and they do effect each other in an almost never ending puzzle of combinations, I decided to try other and more modern applications.
I decided on iManager. That is after all that I know the “latest and greatest” of Novells management applications. So I ran the iManager 2.7 with the 2.7 20070923 plug.-in called ImportConvertExport or simply ICE. The function is added under the “Schema – Extend schema” task under the “Roles and Tasks” tab. That looked promizing until the end when I got an error code stating error 236.
Well… Now what? In the end of the wizard-like “Extend schema” task, iManager displays the “real” ICE console command that it will run if you press “finish” on the last page. For me it looked like this:

ice -lice.log -C -a -SLDIF -f/path/to/my/applev2.ldf -DLDAP -s192.168.0.100 -p389 -dcn=admin,o=organization

I dont really know why, but I think my experience with wizards has been a little, lets say tainted, during the years as an administrator. So I decided to run this command direct from a console window just for fun! 😉

So I copied the applev2.ldf file from my SLED workstation to my SLES server and run the connamd as ROOT. Well now at least something got done. I was asked to enter the password for admin and then presented with the same errors as above.