Let’s Decorate!

Let’s Decorate!

posted by Matt @ 10:37 AM 0 Comments

What Consumes Your Time

As many of you know, lots of my time is consumed by preventing and filtering spam. Necessary evil, but if your hosting e-mail it is a necessity.

A also have a number of other clients who have their own time consuming, non producing activities. Take one of my clients - Aileen Minor. Aileen runs a business selling antiques, lots of furniture and stuff for the garden. I found that one thing that consumes lots of Aileen's time is dealing with inquiries that folks make about the valuation of their antique. Typically the requests include some vague reference to what it looks like, maybe a bit of history and just enough information to tell that its an antique, but not much else.

These are Antiques Roadshow types of people hoping to find a fortune in grandma's junk pile and hoping they came up with some sort of national treasure or something. To do a proper valuation of an antique requires hours of work and research, sending photos back and forth, conversation and detailed descriptions of the antiquity. According to Aileen, this can take lots of time. Most of the time, people end up feeling a bit disappointed because she can't get back to them fast enough or they find out their "prize" would be worth about 2 bucks.

So I guess I don't have it so bad filtering out e-mail, I id where it comes from and whammo, its blocked!

posted by Matt @ 5:18 PM 0 Comments

Christmas is coming!

Well if you celebrate Christmas in July, it is almost here. From my perspective though it is hot and heavy, trying to optimize those sites which seek to do well supplying other businesses/consumers/municipalities with their Christmas decorations and such type of supply. The buying on those things starts at the end of July, and seems to peak sometime in October/November.

One such client is Tom Brady (eDecorSource.com), Tom sells all manner of christmas decor for just about anything you would want to decorate, yards, homes, malls, streets, skyscrapers. If your in the market for just about anything related Tom has it. If you need someone to put it up, take it down or design it for you - he does that too.

posted by Matt @ 3:36 PM 0 Comments

Relay Exchange thru Plesk/QMAIL

Finally some good tech info:

We host lots of websites and frequently host for small companies that would like to use their internal exchange server to send mail. Since we have lots of spam filtering and protection on our webservers, it seems only logical to relay through the webserver where you can use free Linux tools vs expensive Microsoft software. From a security perspective, it only requires that your exchange server only have to talk to one other server via e-mail as well and helps lock down your internal network environment.

All of our servers use Plesk/Qmail, so if your using something different this may not help you.

The steps:

On the Linux webserver:

First make sure all of the proper DNS info is in place for the domain. You want to set up the domain so that your linux box has the MX record pointed at it.

Also make sure that the mail service is turned OFF in the Plesk control panel for the domain.

Update your servers mail whitelist to include the IP address of the exchange server. Note: I don't think you can make dynamic addresses work, so they at least have to have a static IP.

Next, shell into the webserver:

1) update /var/qmail/control/smtproutes to properly reflect the correct mail host for the domain
the entry in the file should look something like: xyzdomain.com:##.##.##.##:
2) update /var/qmail/control/morercpthosts putting in the proper domain name
3) rebuild morercpthosts using /var/qmail/bin/qm-newmrh
4) If you have not already done so, log into plesk control panel , then SERVER > MAIL > WHITELIST, add in the ip of the sending mailserver
5) add IP to any other whitelists, like spamdyke, etc
6) restart QMAIL (service qmail restart)

7) On windows 2k7 or 2K3 open Exchange Management Console
8) Navigate to Organization > Hub Transport > Send Connectors
9) Setup a new send connector, alter existing, key parameter is the next step
10)Under "Network" tab, select route through the following smart hosts (authentication = none or externally secured)
11) save restart the MTA Transport hub

You may further want to specify that any mail communication to the W2K3 or W2K7 domain ONLY comes from your plesk server, this keeps spammers from bombing an otherwise unprotected e-mail server.

This is a nice way to centralize spam protection, av protection etc to your plesk server. I find it is much less expensive and easier to deal with spam in this way.

posted by Matt @ 12:25 PM 0 Comments

Windows 7 Available

Microsoft made it official today, all PC's sold with Vista from 6/26/09 until January 31, 2010 will be able to get Windows 7. Lots of manufacturers jumped on the bandwagon with promotions right away including HP & Lenovo.

For all of you folks that are interested in a new PC, we can therefore offer Equus PCs that include any of the following operating systems:
- Windows XP Pro
- Windows Vista Business
- Windows 7 (out in October of this year)

New PCs from The BitWorks

posted by Matt @ 2:23 PM 0 Comments

Watch Out for those "free" Movies

Got a new notice about the newest Harry Potter movie being available for download (a pirated copy). Of course you also have to download their player to watch the movie. The player also happens to be malware which will infect your pc. Just another way for your kids to get a virus on your computer.

posted by Matt @ 1:38 PM 0 Comments

Raccoons and Birdbaths

We have had a raccoon raiding the birdfeeders lately at the house. Last Saturday night the raccoons decided to take a bath in the birdbath, we have one similar to this one with an old handpump on top of it. Anyway the raccoons dumped the hand pump off and chipped it, luckily it did not break through. It would be great to have some really nice garden antiques like this one but I fear the various critters ( along with winter ) would eventually destroy them.

So right now we are trying to get the raccoons in a live trap and relocate them to coon paradise somewhere in Wisconsin. We put the trap out last night and then right before I fell asleep I am lying in bed thinking what if I catch a skunk in there?

Labels: birdbaths, garden antiques, raccoons, skunks

posted by Matt @ 10:22 AM 0 Comments