My phone turns of the sound from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. every night. Â Normally this works just fine, even on weekends, but this morning at 6 a.m. my very pleasant chime that I’ve put on my Nokia E61i for email notification started chiming every couple of minutes! Â I was getting hammered with “comments” added to my site (which are always moderated), and then I got a message from Google that my blog had been compromised. Â It’s fixed now, but it’s annoying!
Being in the anti-spam business myself, I DO know that there must be SOME return on “investment” for these folks. Â I mean, if every site blocked their missives, if no one clicked on a link, if no one bought their wares, they would stop right (well, all but the most anti-social of the bunch I guess)? Â But my WordPress “spam” has become almost as back as my email spam! Â All I can say is “grumble”.
So anyway, I’ve fixed the problem, and asked Google to recheck the problem, but for those of you who got a warning accessing the site this morning, so sorry!
Stay cool (I have that on the brain right now, living in the Denver area!)
The GroupWise 3.0 for Windows Public Beta has been posted here.
There are a few notes of import if you want to try the beta.
If you use the Palm or Symbian clients with a prior version of GMS, and you are not using network push you might need to open port 3102 to your GMS server. Â While the earlier versions only needed 3102 for true network push, GMS 3 clients require port 3102 be open even for polled syncs!
Both the Palm and Symbian clients have some cool new features, but watch out for the new hot keys! Â They have changed quite a bit since the earlier clients, and you might need to retrain yourself (and your users) on getting the most out of the keyboard.
I wasn’t that familiar with the prior Symbian clients, being a die-hard Treo user (Palm OS) myself, but there are MANY new cool features in the Symbian client, at least from a Treo user’s perspective :)Â
I didn’t really run into any snags in the installation of the server, and if you are already a GMS for Windows admin, it will seem very natural and familiar. Â But if you run into troubles, come see us in the Novell Support Forums in the Wireless newsgroup.
I just spent a really great week in Austria and Germany for the GroupWise and Friends conference (and then on to Switzerland for a couple of days of R&R). Â I had a WONDERFUL time, and have to thank Marco Mikulits for being a WONDERUL tour guide during my stay. Â I was especially grateful for the time he spent showing me Vienna, and feel that for a 3 day stay I got to see quite a bit considering that a good portion of 2 days was spent inside the conference center!
For each of the Austria and Germany events, I presented a 4 hour “GroupWise on Linux” session as a “pre-event special day”, and then a short presentation on the GWIA during their “big day event”. Â Marc Conradty was a co-presenter in that session, and I believe it was well received.
While I attempted to do the sessions in German, I was often side-swiped by my slides and forced back to English when my poor brain wouldn’t translate quickly enough in my head. Â While I might be able to speak decent German, I realize I will never make a living as an interpreter!
Thanks to everyone in the GroupWise and Friends community who made this trip possible. Â Hope to see you again soon!
It’s just been announced that GroupWise 7 SP3 fixes a security issue with shared folders. Without going into all of the gory details, there are ways with the Windows Client API to see mail from the owner of the shared folder that is not inside of the specific shared folder. In order to protect your site from this, you need to apply GroupWise 7 SP3, or GroupWise 6.5, SP3 Update 3 and lockout all older clients.
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You are at risk if you allow shared folders in your organization. That said, the exploit cannot be used by your standard user with the GroupWise client. However, a programmer with knowledge of the Windows Client API could build an applet that would allow him/her to peek at other items in the shared folder owner’s mailbox.
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Of course, only you know if the extent of the risk for your organization warrants you staying up late tonight! But patch you should!
Vienna is one of those cities that I’ve always wanted to visit, and luckily I get my chance in May! I’ve been invited by GroupWise & Friends to speak at their events in Austria and Germany during the EMEA GroupWise Tour. I will be speaking in Vienna on May 5 & 6, and on to Bad Homburg in Germany May 7 & 8.
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My speaking topics and details of the tour meetings are still being worked out. But if you are in the area in May and want to drop by and say hi, I’d love to see you!
Greylisting you ask? Isn’t that a dirty word Danita? Well, it certainly can be. In fact, in its “default” implementation, greylisting can be downright detrimental to the efficient and timely flow of email. For those of you who aren’t sure what I mean, let me explain.
Most of you are familiar with the ideas of “blacklisting” and “whitelisting”. Blacklists are to prevent any mail from a certain sender, domain or even mail server from being delivered to your mailbox or your users’ mailboxes. Whitelisting, on the other hand, does the opposite. It provides for the immediate delivery of all mail from a particular sender, domain or even mail server. So what’s this “greylisting” thing then. Greylisting is the practice of initially rejecting an email, as though the email server is unavailable (usually a generic 450 message, or a 451 message specifically indicating that the message is being delayed), and waiting for the sending server to send again. The theory behind greylisting is that most spam, viruses and trojans are delivered by mail servers or PCs that aren’t interested in specifically getting to “you”. They are just interested in spewing out as much junk as they can in the hopes that a certain percentage “sticks”.
So, then, what is the problem with greylisting overall? The biggest problem is time. It’s bad enough that someone in New York sends me an email, and immediately after clicking “send” picks up the phone to see if I’ve received it. I mean, it takes a COUPLE of minutes to get from their server to mine for goodness sakes. But what if every email sent to my mail server had to “wait” until the sending server tried again on its regularly scheduled “defer” cycle? Most servers are set to try after 20 minutes. By default that’s what GroupWise has also always done. Some servers can be configured to send at a shorter interval. Indeed GroupWise can do that as well. But if you leave most things at their defaults, you will find that 20-30 minutes delay for the first mail deferment if a mail server is down is quite standard. Thus, greylisting gets a really bad name because it just serves to delay the orderly delivery of our email.
So, some bright guy (reportedly SATOH Kiyoshi (http://k2net.hakuba.jp/rgrey/, in Japanese) came up with the idea that not only is most “junk” sent from mail servers and PCs that aren’t really interested in “who” they hit (just that they want to hit a high enough percentage of their recipients), but also that most “junk” is sent from a certain type of mail host. This form of greylisting suggests seven rules to test for whether or not a mail host is “suspect”. These rules are based on the idea that most of these hosts will either not have a reverse DNS look up at all, will have one that doesn’t “match”, or will have a reverse DNS entry that seems to indicate the sender is on a dynamically assigned address. You can find out more about these rules here. If you could use these rules in greylisting to only greylist senders that are caught by one of these rules, well defined and maintained mail servers would never be trapped by the greylisting mechanism (thus ensuring that most “real” mail would be processed immediately), and only those that were “suspect” would be delayed. I’ve been using this mechanism for almost a year now in my own system. Here are some stats from one of the servers that I manage that show you how this works:
Total Delivered Mail : 56918 ( 4.8% ) ( 15.9% )
Unique Mail Recipients : 1236 ( 100.0% )
The important thing here (although it’s all fascinating) is that of 294108 greylisted entries, only 1775 attempted a second delivery! Now, is it possible that some real mail gets “dropped” in this? It would be possible, but not terribly probable. There are very few mail servers out there who will not retry an email on a 450 or 451 error. And in over a year of using this type of greylisting, I’ve only had to whitelist one IP address to avoid the greylisting process.
So, now I know your next thought is “But I use GroupWise, and we have GWAVA (or Guinevere, or GWGuardian, or whatever), and I have no idea how I would do something like this”. It’s easy to forget that Linux is our friend! I’ve put up Linux PCs (or even Virtual Machines) all over the place as front-ends to the GroupWise Internet Agent to provide this functionality for customers. This doesn’t have to be a “server” either - just plain old vanilla Linux with Postfix installed! There is a Postfix add-on called Postgrey that can provide greylisting services for postfix, and it’s very easy to configure. In fact, to get it to work for this modified greylisting, you can get all of the information in this particular newsgroup post.
Imagine how much more processing power you could give back to GWGuardian, or GWAVA or Guinevere if you dropped 98% of the mail that it’s processing now before it even has to look at it!
The BrainShare Scheduler is Live and it’s time to get scheduling. And of course, even though the Early-Bird specials have passed, you can still register for BrainShare this year - it’s never really too late - just go to the Novell BrainShare site to register or work out your schedule.
I will be speaking at BrainShare for three separate sessions. Be sure to check out TUT205 — Upgrading to GroupWise Bonsai, TUT220 — Migrating Novell GroupWise to Linux, and BOF210 — Protecting your Organization’s Novell Groupwise Investment.
Personally, I find a number of sessions quite interesting, and it’s quite distressing for me that I can’t attend them all! For example, IO146 — Using SSH with Linux, DL300 — Using SOAP with GroupWise Document Management, TUT210 — An In-depth Look at the Novell GroupWise Internet Agent, TUT301 — Securing Your Novell GroupWise System, TUT302 — Best Practices for Administering Novell GroupWise, TUT303 — Open Enterprise Server 2 Cluster: From Beginning to Extremes. I could go on and on and on.
I had a really good time in San Diego for GWAVACon, even though I was soooooooooo sick. Â I thank all of you who attended my Saturday “Afternoon with Danita” where we pondered the ins and outs of GroupWise on Linux. Â Sorry I had to sit down in the chair a few times, but that was preferable to falling down I think!
For those of you who missed it, (both the Afternoon with Danita AND GWAVACon itself), I think you missed an excellent conference. Â As usual the GWAVA folks put on a wonderful show with first quality accommodation and venue.
I took some time while I was there to spend some time in my old home of Ocean Beach, and visited a friend I haven’t seen in 10 years (and her husband who I haven’t seen in about 20!). Â Good times were had by all.
While I was walking around Ocean Beach, down the street where I lived, I noticed the following house, which I think embodies the spirit of the place, and made me want to go home, pack up the family and move back to Ocean Beach <heehee>.
Just in time for the holidays! Advansys has released version 1.5 of Archive to Go, and version 1.0 of Filing Assistant.
Since we began selling Advansys products, we’ve found that Archive to Go seems to be one of our customers’ favorites. We love it too! Archive To Go is a very versatile way to retain email for former employees, archive out mail for departing employees, archiving specific folders as projects complete, and much more. If you don’t have it for your organization, now’s the time. From now til the end of the year we’ll be having an Archive To Go Promotion, offering 5% off of any Archive To Go purchase. Just go to our Advansys page, and on your final check outwill see your discount.
In addition, Advansys has released Filing Assistant version 1.0, a Formativ applet that allows you to quickly and easily file items into a folder easily and quickly, uncluttering your mailbox. If you purchase Filing Assistant with Archive to Go, we’ll throw in a 5% discount for that too!
If you haven’t registered for the all hands-on GroupWise Summit in Belgium you still have time! There are only 13 seats remaining though, so you need to get moving! To find out more about the summit go to the GroupWiseR site and see what’s up. Last year’s summit was a HUGE hit. Where else can you spend a few days in front of a laptop learning from top industry experts? The reviews from last year were all very positive, and we expect this year to be even more successful (and about 30 more seats have been added to give more folks a chance to join in).
Don’t miss some great info on GMS on Linux, Teaming and Conferencing, sneak peaks at Bonsai, and many other exciting GroupWise topics. And if you are a developer interested in SOAP this is a don’t miss event. Tim Draper and Tommy Mikkelsen will give you some great insight into the many possibilities of developing with SOAP. Last year these were some of the most well received sessions in the event!
So hurry and get registered! Only a bit over two weeks until the big event!
- just go to the 