Software

IMAP backup service accepting beta testers

Lance Robinson — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:44:18 GMT

ImapBack makes a complete copy of your emails, on any IMAP server, from Gmail to Google Apps, to your own custom IMAP server located anywhere in the world! These backups can be stored on another IMAP server, on our servers, or on your local hard drive. You can schedule any interval of backups (Daily, Hourly, Weekly, Monthly) as well as creating a backup on-demand.

On a related note, if you need an easy way to view and control IMAP access control, check out my IMAP ACL Manager application.

Technorati Tags: IMAP, Backup

Why is configuring Net-snmp so painful?

Lance Robinson — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 19:20:00 GMT

This incomplete tutorial gets a person started, but then bails on the second half of the process of configuring actual users. Instead it points you to the man page, which is basically useless and conflicts with directions mentioned in the snmp.conf man page! Ugh!

This page is a little bit better, it helps me get an authNoPriv user up and going.

From there, I was able to add my authPriv users too:

As described in the first tutorial mentioned above, run snmpconf –g basic_setup and then copy over the conf file.
net-snmp-config –create-snmpv3-user –a “auth_password” –X DES -x “des_password” desuser
net-snmp-config –create-snmpv3-user –a “auth_password” –X AES –x “aes_password” aesuser

Technorati Tags: net-snmp, snmpv3

NetCmdlets Invoke-Telnet?! And other PowerShell madness.

Lance Robinson — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 20:57:15 GMT

On last week’s PowerScripting Podcast, Jonathan Walz and Hal Rottenberg interview /n software’s Eric Madariaga about NetCmdlets and PowerShellToys (PowerShellASP).

My favorite part was when Hal was shocked to hear that a telnet cmdlet was added to the v2 beta. Hahaha. I completely agree – who uses telnet anymore? But that was actually the biggest request we got from people who were using v1 of NetCmdlets! We already had cmdlets for executing commands over ssh…but people really wanted telnet. This shows you how many sys admins are still using this older means of working remotely. Jonathan was under the impression that telnet isn’t included on Vista – he’s correct that it is not installed by default, but you can install it from the Windows Features Control Panel tool.

Hal asked Eric how the PowerShell server managed the keys that are used for its SSH authentication. The answer is that it doesn’t. The PowerShell server only supports user/password authentication, not public key authentication. If the demand is there, public key authentication can be added pretty easily (we already have this technology implemented in our IP*Works! SSH developer toolkit). With PowerShell Server, you point it to a Windows user group that is allowed to authenticate, and when you connect to it you use that user/password. I’ve been meaning to do a blog post comparing remoting through WinRM (what PowerShell 2 uses) with remoting through the NetCmdlets PowerShell Server, but I haven’t gotten around to it. Long story short? PowerShell Server is SIMPLE.

Eric mentioned the fact that Sapien has integrated PowerShellASP support into PrimalScript, which is awesome. PrimalScript is a fabulous editor.

Also mentioned in the interview:

PoshBoard, which is an awesome PowerShell dashboard that Hal told me about a while ago. The developer, Antoine Habert, contacted me about integrating PowerShellASP with it. Lots of really cool potential here.
On the NetCmdlets road-map: SharePoint cmdlets, EC2 and SimpleDb cmdlets, BizTalk cmdlets, Shipping (FedEx, UPS, USPS) cmdlets.
Free hobbyist license of NetCmdlets.
The famous PowerShell stickers. There’s a “PowerShell Driven” Flickr group where you can upload a picture of your car (or laptop, or whatever else) sporting your new PowerShell sticker!
/n software doesn’t have a NetCmdlets blog. At least not an official one. :)

Technorati Tags: PowerShell, NetCmdlets

IMAP ACL Manager v2

Lance Robinson — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 17:41:30 GMT

I uploaded a new version of the IMAP Access Control List Manager today. This new version adds support for SSL/TLS implicit and explicit connections, CRAM-MD5 and NTLM authentication, an IMAP communication log, and a few other minor and cosmetic changes.

Technorati Tags: IMAP, IMAP ACL, ACL

SlickEdit 2008 - My Evaluation

Lance Robinson — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 20:48:45 GMT

I got a free version of SlickEdit in return for blogging about the experience. So here is my feedback, good and bad.

Good: First thing I noticed when I installed it: this is not your ordinary text editor. I've been using UltraEdit for several years now, and I like it. UltraEdit has some developer-centric capabilities, but they are not integrated tightly into the product as is the case with SlickEdit. For example, SlickEdit will automatically expand if and for statements, and try blocks, although I didn't see a way to have it automatically generate the finally clause. Honestly, despite any negative criticism that I have of SlickEdit, I think that this is the kind of application that has so many features that in order to properly appreciate them you must use it for a long time, so I plan to revisit this evaluation in the future.

Good: Ctrl-F worked for find, but I'm used to F3 doing the "Find Next" (From Visual Studio and Ultra Edit). A quick look in the Options menu allowed me to change my keyboard emulation from CUA () to Visual Studio Defaults. Problem solved. Very nice.

Annoying: The next thing that came up, when I hit ctrl-N to open a new page, instead of just giving me a new untitled page, it gives me a window in which I have to choose the type of file I want to create. Its default is "automatic", which gives me what I want but still requires me to click an "OK" button. I'd rather eliminate this step and have it figure this out the file type on its own after I do a save-as and assign it an extension.

Annoying: I created two unsaved files containing some xml, and when to compare them to find out the difference(s) in the two files. I found a "File Difference" option under the Tools menu. It gives me a dialog with two file path inputs, both empty. I would expect the two most recently edited/opened files to be pre-populated there as they are with UltraEdit. I thought this was going to be a lot of extra clicks but then I saw the little "B" button next to the two path inputs that allowed me to choose the "buffers" (the files I had open in the editor). Only like 6 extra clicks. Not so bad, but could have been smarter.

Annoying: I wish it had asked me during the install process if I'd like to update my file associations. Instead I have to go searching around in the menus for it.

Good: The code navigation feature is sooooo useful. If you are editing code, and you want to see the definition of a particular call, just hit ctrl-. and SlickEdit will jump to the definition. I use this fairly often.

Good: Built in backup history allows you to view previous versions, and even merge and diff different versions. Awesome!

Overall, I'd have to say this is a great app. Incredibly powerful. I will post more details about this later, as I continue to compare with UltraEdit.

Now Playing: Bob Marley & the Wailers - Exodus

Technorati Tags: SlickEdit

Software for Rock Star Wanna-be's

Lance Robinson — Thu, 15 May 2008 16:01:46 GMT

Charles Pyron at Stellar Media (a video production company in NC) on home audio recording software.

RSSBus: Simple Ways to Connect Data

Lance Robinson — Tue, 06 May 2008 18:57:49 GMT

I just uploaded a new YouTube video for RSSBus. Some of it is hard to see, but soon it will be published at rssbus.com as a high quality flash video.

RSSBus can be used to securely serve custom feeds over the Internet or on the local host. This video shows examples of very basic feeds that can be created with RSSBus with just a few mouse clicks, and more complex piped feeds. Near the end, the video shows some ways in which RSSBus can be integrated into real world solutions. Obviously, RSSBus can make your data accessible through anything that supports RSS or Atom feeds, but it can also make your data accessible to many other productive environments and applications like Excel, software development languages (.Net, ActiveX, Delphi, C++ Builder, VC++, Python, etc), Windows PowerShell, Windows WorkFlow, etc.

Enough of that: here's the video, yo:

Technorati Tags: RSSBus, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Mashup, Feeds, Atom

ASP.Net Medium Trust and IPWorks/IBiz ASP.Net Editions

Lance Robinson — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 18:58:13 GMT

This great MSDN article: "How To: Use Medium Trust in ASP.NET 2.0" will probably answer nearly all of your questions about how to work in medium trust and how to customize medium trust permissions. Here are a few extracts from this document that serve as a sort of "quick start" to medium trust.

By default, ASP.NET 2.0 Web applications and Web services run with full trust and applications can perform privileged operations and access resources subject only to operating system security and Windows access control lists (ACLs). You can use code access security (CAS) to restrict access to certain resources by using the trust element of the web.config. You can set full, high, medium, low, and minimal trust.
Medium restricts you from using OldDbPermission, EventLogPermission, ReflectionPermission, RegistryPermission, calling unmanaged code, and using Enterprise Services. Also WebPermission (you can only communicate with address(es) defined in the trust element) and FileIOPermission (You can only access files in your applications virtual directory hierarchy) are restricted.
To turn on medium trust, set the trust level to medium in your app-level or machine-level web.config (<trust level="Medium" />). Consider the originUrl attribute for the trust element, which allows you to limit what Urls the web application(s) can access.
You can customize medium trust restrictions (e.g., modify FileIOPermission to allow access to a specific directory outside of the applications virtual directory hierarchy) by creating a custom policy file and custom policy level. There is a great example of this provided in the article.

Note: machine.config can be found in the "%windir%\Microsoft.Net\Framework\xxx\config" directory.

How all this applies to IP*Works! and IBiz products:

In general, all /n software .Net components will need the following permissions, all of which are granted by default in Medium trust except SocketPermission:
1. FileIOPermission - all components, for licensing and file access.
2. ReflectionPermission - all components, for licensing.
3. SocketPermission - all components that use socket communication.
4. DnsPermission - anytime a hostname is used instead of a dotted IP address.
To add SocketPermission to your custom medium trust, just add the following security class and ipermission to your custom policy config:

<SecurityClass Name="SocketPermission" Description="System.Net.SocketPermission, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089"/>

<IPermission class="SocketPermission" version="1" Unrestricted="true" />
If you build with nsoftware.System.dll or if you're using a product that uses unsafe or unmanaged code (like SSL which uses pinvokes to security libraries installed on Windows machines), you'll need to set the SkipVerification flags and ManagedCode flags (respectively) of SecurityPermission in your custom policy file.
You may wish to alter the WebPermission permission to allow access to any Uri.
You could use CodeGroups with the IMembershipCondition (StrongNameMembershipCondition) to restrict custom config settings specifically to code signed by /n software.

NewsGator client apps are now free

Lance Robinson — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 19:12:27 GMT

Yesterday, NewsGator announced that it is making all if its RSS reader applications free. That includes FeedDemon (which I love and have been using for years), NetNewsWire, NewsGator Go, NewsGator Online, and NewsGator Inbox. Individual downloads.

Rock on! IPWorks v8 Released!

Lance Robinson — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 21:25:17 GMT

Wow, I can have a V8! Thanks to the hard work of some very talented developers, who I saw working late hours coding and testing, the next version of IPWorks is here! Yep, /n software announced today the release of IP*Works! V8 .Net and Java Editions.

I got to work a lot with IPWorks v8 during its beta period, and my favorite thing about this version update is the new custom types and collections. I used the new Atom and Rest components, which are useful and easy to use. Other new features that I have already used a lot are the firewall/proxy auto-detection, support for NTLM authentication, greater XPath support in the XMLp component (which I use all the time), stream support.

Also, this new update includes the support I want for my Vista x64 machine, and IPv6.

Technorati Tags: IPWorks, .Net