Larry Brouwer

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SmarterMail Security Lockdown Procedures

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I spent most of the afternoon tracking down a problem with my web server. Performance came to a standstill. So I went into Task manager and found the MailService.exe process was maxing out resources. I rebooted, and found that it would gradually start taking more and more resources until the system became virtually unusable. Within 20 minutes after a reboot of the system, it would be hogging most of the memory, and max out the CPU to 100%. I also looked through the event Application logs. Searched for ‘mail’. Found errors “System.OutOfMemoryException: Exception of type ‘System.OutOfMemoryException’ was thrown.”.

I then Googled on ‘mailservice.exe memory System.OutOfMemoryException’ and found this post on SmarterTools Forums – MailService.exe memory reporting issue in 6.5. Many users seem to be experiencing this problem. A second post from the SmarterTools Forums – HELP! SmarterMail.exe keeps failing every few hours also indicates that this is a Microsoft .Net issue. They refer to the prior post stating the fix is to re-install Microsoft .Net. I’ve already attempted this procedure before. See my prior post 2010-04-23 Notes for the day.

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Blank emails with OfficeLive Outlook Connector and repairing Outlook 2007 .PST files

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This morning, my Outlook inbox has messages with no ‘From’, no ‘Subject’, and nothing in the ‘body’. So, I’m thinking that the .pst file has been corrupted at some point. I Googled on ‘Outlook 2007 repair tool’ and came up with this Microsoft Support article “How to use the Inbox Repair Tools to recover e-mail messages in Outlook 2002, Outlook 2003, and Outlook 2007”. I followed the instructions to repair my outlook .pst file as follows:

Open windows explorer and navigate to the folder where my outlook files are stored. Normally, this would be in: C:\users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook, however, I’ve moved them to: My Documents\Exchange.

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IIS7 Extensions Loaded on development web server

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In this post, I just want to keep track of what IIS7 extensions I’ve installed on my development web server, and some brief notes about them. The extensions are located at http://www.iis.net/.

1. Search Engine Optimization Toolkit.

2. Web Platform Installer. This allows for installation of Web Platform Extensions, New Web Applications (i.e. BlogEngine.Net), and Beta Extensions from within the IIS manager. You should really check out the samples. They are also located at: http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery

3. Advanced logging.

4. Admin Pack 1.0. Originally, I was doing some googling on reporting tools for IIS7 and came across a post for an open source report framework that is an extension to IIS. In the post it said that the reporting tools had been added to the Admin Pack. However, once I installed the Admin Pack, I could not find the reports anywhere. Upon further digging, I found some posts stating that the Reporting extension had been pulled at release, but was still in the Admin Pack RC. I could not find anything to suggest that a report extension is forthcoming.

5. URL Rewrite 2.0 (2010-04-05).

6. Microsoft .NET Framework 4 (2010-04-29)

7. Windows Powershell 2.0 (2010-04-29)

8. Visual Web Developer 2010 Express (2010-04-29)

9. Database Manager 1.0 (2010-04-29)

10. ASP.NET MVC 2 (2010-04-29)

11. Windows Cache Extension for PHP 5.2 (2010-04-29)

12. Update for IIS 7.0 FastCGI (KB980363) (2010-04-29)

13. PHP 5.2.13 (2010-04-29)

14. WordPress (2010-04-29)

15. MySQL Connector/Net 5.2 (Dependency) (2010-04-29)

16. MySQL Windows Essential 5.1 (2010-04-29)

17. Hotfix for IIS DB Manager (2010-04-29)

IIS7 Statistics Reporting with Log Parser and AWStats

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Today, I decided that I needed to see a little bit more about the traffic hitting my website. So I set off attempting to find a tool that will help me do just that. After doing some Googling, I ran across a Microsoft utility called Log Parser. So I downloaded and installed it. A great post to read about Log Parser is by Steve Bunting. Another post by Jeff Atwood here. Microsoft Technet has an article about how Log Parser works here. Log Parser is not officially a supported Microsoft tool, the forum site can be found here. Another article from Symantec discusses the fields for parsing and some examples here. I played around with Log Parser some and got some rudimentary results. But since I didn’t want to recreate the wheel, I decided to keep searching.

After Googling on “IIS7 Statistics”, I stumbled upon AWStats. I decided to install it. The documentation for installing on Windows Server 2008 is pretty weak. I found a  great guide to installing AWStats here. The steps can be summarized as follows:

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Adding AWStats to DotNetNuke (DNN)

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I’ve just configured AWStats to work with IIS7 on my web server (see my post, IIS7 Statistics Reporting with Log Parser and AWStats), and now I would like to integrate it into my DotNetNuke (DNN) website.

Here’s an outline of what I would like to do:

  1. Be able to log into my DNN web site as an authenticated user and navigate to a web statistics page. I don’t want anonymous users to view my stats.
  2. Create a script that runs in the background to keep the statistics up to date and have it re-generate the html page for the stats.
  3. See if I can programmatically adjust the LoadPlugin=”timezone –7” for US Central daylight savings or standard time. I really don’t want to have to remember this 2x per year.

So the first thing I did was to open the IIS7 Manager and navigate to my DNN website. I then Right Clicked on it and selected ‘Add Virtual Directory…’. I then choose ‘Statistics’ for my Alias, and navigated to the correct directory path of the AWStats webroot or ‘C:\AWStats\wwwroot’. I then opened up IE and navigated to my web site at https://www.larrybrouwer.com/stats/larrybrouwer_com_stats.html, and it displayed just fine.

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Microsoft Visual Studio Tips Part 1 – Basic Editing and Navigation

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Here are some notes taken from the book Visual Studio Tipsby Sara Ford.

0-0: Look Up, Change, or Create shortcuts

  • Tools | Options (select all settings) | Environment-Keyboard | (Press shortcut-keys:)

Press the short-cut key you want to know what it does, and it will be displayed in the box below or enter the command in the (Show commands containing:) and it will show the short-cut.

1-1: Not accidentally copying blank lines

  • Tools | Options | Text Editor | All Languages | General | Uncheck the (Apply Cut or Copy commands to blank lines when there is no selection)

This will prevent the editor from clearing the clipboard when you accidentally hit Ctrl+C on a blank line.

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Installing BlogEngine.Net

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Over the past several months, I’ve been wanting to start a journal to keep track of all the encounters of my daily programmer life. Until now, I’ve mainly used Microsoft Outlook’s Journal feature. This works fine, but it doesn’t publish it for all the world to see. What if I actually do discover something useful for others to get some good out of it? I could have taken the easy route and just used an existing blog site or facebook I suppose. But, since I’m in learning mode, why not set up my own website, with my own personal blog? What a cool idea, right? So I set off googling and stumbled upon BlogEngine.Net. This link gives you some more choices of what’s currently out there: http://csharp-source.net/open-source/bloggers It’s a customizable open source ASP.Net blog application written C#. Link to BlogEngine.Net .

For the sake of this blog entry, I’ve already got my environment ready to go.

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