Friday, January 15, 2010

Microsoft Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer

“The Remote Connectivity Analyzer is a web based tool that's designed to help IT administrators to troubleshoot connectivity issues with their Exchange Server deployments. It allows administrators to test connectivity to their Exchange domains remotely from outside of their organizations internal networks. In order to use this tool, you must enter the credentials of a working account from the Exchange domain to be tested. To avoid the potential risk of working credentials being exploited and therefore compromising the security of your Exchange environment, we strongly recommend that you create a test account for the purpose of using this tool, and delete this account immediately after you have completed the connectivity testing.”

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Ubuntu "Extras" to Add After an Installation

Ubuntu can play many non-free media formats such as Flash, MP3, Quicktime, WMV, DVD, etc. These formats are not supported "out of the box" due to various conflicts in licensing philosophies but they can be installed with a simple command entered in a terminal window:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

This link indicates that this is for Ubuntu 9.04, 8.10, 8.04 but it worked for my 9.10 version as well. There is an alternate 9.04 / 9.10 installation option on this link as well but I have not tried it yet.

Additional extras such as Google Earth, Real Player and video codecs can be installed via Medibuntu (Multimedia, Entertainment & Distractions In Ubuntu). "Medibuntu is a packaging project dedicated to distributing software that cannot be included in Ubuntu for various reasons, related to geographical variations in legislation regarding intellectual property, security and other issues."

To add the repository:
sudo wget --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list &&
sudo apt-get --quiet update && sudo apt-get --yes --quiet
--allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get
--quiet update
Full installation instructions are here, in the Ubuntu documentation.

The Medibuntu repository is deactivated by upgrading to a newer Ubuntu version so you will need to run the command again after upgrading.

Note that Medibuntu no longer provides Acrobat Reader (acroread). Instead, enable the Canonical partner repository under System->Administration->Software Sources->Third Party Software.

Friday, January 08, 2010

ASSP

"Stop Spam with the Anti-Spam-SMTP-Proxy (ASSP)

Want to put an end to SPAM? Try the deadly poison of ASSP!

Congratulations! You have just found the absolute best SPAM fighting weapon that the world has ever known! When it comes to killing SPAM nothing is as deadly as an ASSP! Check out the ASSP project site at sourceforge.net! "

http://assp.sourceforge.net/