So I think I’ve finally come down to nailing what in the world was causing some emails to be randomly rejected after implementing ZoneEdit’s backup MX service. Now this post may be invalid if my understanding of greylisting is flawed but let me play it out. So someone sends us a email, the email is greylisted and bounced back to their server to be resent. The server says “Ok let me try this other MX”. It sends to the other MX which is zoneedit’s backup MX service.

Now here is the rub. ZoneEdit’s backup MX also does it’s own form of spam scanning which you cannot edit. It will reject messages that do not match the hostname. I see a lot of mail come in where the Client host has a active directory name like mailserver.local. So the secondary MX rejects it to the original sender with a 550 Client host rejected: cannot find your hostname. That secondary MX doesn’t even try and send me the message.

I also saw the message on the main xwall page about greylisting and zoneedit, which sort of pointed out to my ah HA! moment. So it either comes down to not using greylisting or dropping the secondary MX.

This is my Oregon Scientific Wireless Weather Station up on the roof of my house. I have a serial connection setup from my indoor receiver to one of my servers which then logs the data, compiles and ftps the data every 15 seconds to my website. You can rest assured that I graph all the logged data.

• Tabled data dump from station
• Daily, Monthly, Yearly Averages and Trends
• Graphical Representation of Current Data
• My station (KORPORTL108) on the weather underground

When I found this out, I was stunned. We have someone in the office with a Dell laptop that kept complaining about meetings making themselves as recurring. I looked at the issue and figured it was user error. A week later he came back and complained that again a meeting had turned itself into a recurring meeting.

Then I discovered this little gem.

This “bug” affects only Dell laptops with Direct Media.

Dell laptops include an application called Media Direct and this application installs an Outlook add-in called “Outlook Setup Addin” which is causing problems for some users. This add-in supports the Instant Office feature of Media Direct. Uninstall it from Control panel, Add and Remove Programs to prevent the problem with future meeting requests.

Along with causing meeting requests to become recurring, it doesn’t work well with Outlook 2007 and is responsible for at least some of the complaints about Outlook 2007′s slowness and CPU resources spiking.

BAH! Removed the program and no more issues.

I’m just going to blog a quick bit about using netstat. The command netstat (NETwork STATistics) will display network connections, routing tables and information on network interfaces. This is a command line tool. It is available on windows as well as *nix. I’m talking mostly about it in regards to the world of windows.

In the past I’d run netstat, use it to show what connections are open and on what port. It also would display the PID allowing me to open task manager and see what PID is using that port. I recently found out that since SP2 on XP (and I’m going to assume Vista). That you can run the following command.

netstat -nob

Netstat -nob will do the PID look up also. Resulting in a display like so.

TCP 127.0.0.1:2599 127.0.0.1:2598 ESTABLISHED 7568
[firefox.exe]

Of course yours will be a longer list. So in summary.

* Bring up your command line

* run netstat -nob

* HOORAY enjoy all your information

I get a lot of different smartphones thrown on my desk to be repaired. Today our CEO came in with his Sprint Mogul (which is pretty slick of the HTC series. A lot more refined than my HTC 8525). Anyways it is performing an endless reboot. Since I can’t get into the OS of it, there isn’t much I can do. So I figured I’ll do a hard reset.

So I fire up google and look for information on hard reseting the Sprint HTC Mogul. Well I’ll be damned if there isn’t really any clear information. I did end up finding it but I had to load the pdf from the sprint site. So here it is in texty blog goodness.

Hard Reset
You can also perform a hard reset (also known as a full reset). A hard reset should be performed only if a normal reset does not solve a system problem. After a hard reset, the device is restored to its default settings — the way it was when you first purchased it and turned it on. Any programs you installed, data you entered, and settings you customized on the device will be lost. Only Windows Mobile software and other pre-installed programs will remain.

To perform a hard reset:
1. Press and hold both softkeys on the device. Keep these keys pressed, and at the same time, use the stylus to lightly press and hold the RESET button on the bottom of your device.
NOTE: I had no idea which of the many keys were considered the soft keys. They are the two buttons above the phone control buttons.

2. Release the stylus but keep the softkeys pressed when you see the following message on your device screen:
“Do you want to erase all user data and restore to manufacture default?”
3. Slide open the hardware keyboard, and press R to restore to factory default or press X to exit the hard reset process.

Note:
Your device will be set back to factory default settings. Please ensure any additional installed programs and user data have been backed up before a hard reset is performed.

There you go. Hard reset on the Sprint Mogul.

I don’t know what it is but I turn on sticky keys about once a week. It always happens at the worse time and the effect of being crippled by the sticky key loop is well, crippling. Turning off sticky keys is actually not very straight forward once it is turned on. Hit shift 5 times then window comes up and says to disable sticky keys hit cancel. Easy enough, click cancel. It is still on.

Here is the solution

TO TURN OFF STICKY KEYS HIT BOTH SHIFT KEYS

Just a PSA.

I tangoed with Vista on a new workstation batch we ordered at work. About 10 systems came in during a period where Dell would ONLY ship this line with Vista (they’ve changed this now). We ended up returning half of them and with the others formatting them back to XP using the OEM licensing structure. Why? Half of our software didn’t run on Vista and when we contacted our software vendors they said they had no plans in making Vista compatible programs for another year. Also the performance decrease for no actual gain (except the window flip interface in aero… *yawn* how *cute*). Basically people seemed a little ticked off at microsoft for this stunt.

My own workstation was one that I kept Vista, mostly because I didn’t have time to format it but I figured I’d be supporting it soon enough due to Microsoft’s strong arm tactics of forcing OS downgrades. One thing I noticed right away was telnet was missing. For the life of me I cannot figure out why one would disable the telnet protocol except that the stock telnet always sucked and maybe, just maybe a trojan could use the telnet app to reach out to something else (doubtful since a trojan will normally bring its own payload).

Anyways here is how one can enable telnet in vista.

1) Goto Control Panel

2) Click Programs (the renamed add/remove programs)

3) Turn windows Features On/Off

4) A window interface will pop up. You’ll want to scroll down this and select ‘telnet client’ and then select Ok.

Telnet is old, it is insecure but it is still used plenty day to day for testing things. Is the pop server responding, sure let me telnet in and check the banner.

I lasted about 2 months on vista then formatted back to XP