We’ve been working on some major upgrades to our Exchange environment over the last while. During the course of that, we started receiving NDR’s for messages sent to mail-enabled public folders. Initially, these were “MapiExceptionNotAuthorized” messages, which are related to permissions. Those were sorted out without too much trouble, as the NDR is at least somewhat descriptive. But then we started receiving a very generic NDR of #550 4.4.7 QUEUE.Expired; message expired ##. ...not really much to go on. Exchange 2007 does give some more “in plain English, please!” information in its NDR’s, but that also wasn’t much help: Delivery has failed to these recipients or distribution lists: [user display name] Microsoft Exchange has been trying to deliver this message without success and has stopped trying. Please try sending this message again, or provide the following diagnostic text to your system administrator. Wow...that was helpful…

As part of some mail filter testing, I needed to install ESET Mail Security onto a Debian 4.0 Etch VPS running on Virtuozzo. As a side-note, I found that the install package for ESET’s Gateway Filter, Mail Security, and File Server Security for Linux is all the exact same package; the functionality is basically just controlled/activated by means of licensing the appropriate component. Anyway, the download comes as an installation script called esets.i386.deb.bin. Running that script outputs a license agreement that you have to accept, produces a .deb package called esets.i386.deb, and outputs instructions on how to install the .deb package by using dpkg and import the license file. The .deb package installed just fine on another Debian test box, but when I attempted to run dpkg –i esets.i386.deb on the Virtuozzo VPS, tar squawked at me that it could not open /dev/stdin and the installation bailed: hostname:/usr/local/src/eset# dpkg -i esets-3.0.11.i386.deb Selecting previously deselected package esets. (Reading database ... 24639 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking esets (from esets-3.0.11.i386.deb) ... Setting up esets (3.0.11) ... Unpacking esets modules ... tar: /dev/stdin: Cannot open: No such file or directory tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now dpkg: error processing esets (--install): subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 2 Errors were encountered while processing: esets…

I had not previously played aroung much with MySQL replication, but got the chance to do so recently. I'm doing some testing with a new mail filter setup composed of amavisd-new, SpamAssassin, and some other SA modules running through Postfix on Debian Etch. The setup uses Maia Mailguard as a web front-end and management system, including per-user settings and quarantines. We're using MySQL for the database backend for Maia for storing quarantines, per-user settings and the like, but wanted to have a dual-MX setup with a secondary MX sitting in a remote site…

Lately, our company has started developing user web portals for our clients. The main goal is to provide a central reference point for common links (webmail, helpdesk, remote assistance links ... ), howto documents, and other files and resources. A secondary goal was to also allow user administrators to perform basic user management through a web interface. This would include things like disabling/creating/unlocking user accounts, resetting passwords, and modifying group memberships for access reasons. Myself and the other admin tasked with setting up this portal are most familiar with PHP, and so we went of looking for the best means of interfacing with Active Directory through PHP…