Category Archives: Geekery - Page 2

Summer In Review, Episode 1: The Outlook Menace

Posted by on October 24, 2008 No comments

This summer, the Uni moved to a new mail system.  We left behind the customized IMAP over TLS/SMTP over SSL setup for a newer, supported and more advanced setup.  The new back-end is Zimbra Collaboration Suite.  Being that this isn’t only a mail system, but a collaboration suite (hence the nifty title) it’ll also support calendaring and IM.

Pre-migration, my group used Thunderbird to access their mail via IMAP over SSL.  When there weren’t server problems (of which there were a few) this was a fast, easy and slick method of managing email.  We had access to an LDAP server for campus addresses and Thunderbird was especially apt at narrowing down your list of addresses as you filled in a To:/From: field (this is something I miss on a daily basis).  For personal and collected addresses there was the Thunderbird address book.  TB provides strong searching utils (quick search and advanced), tagging (custom tags, not just colored, nameless flags) and threading (something I used for lists, came in VERY handy).  That’s just out of the box, with add-ons, applying notes to messages and working with PGP messages is trivial.

For years, TB served us and did it well.  The only complaints I got, were about missing features, of course, the features weren’t missing, it was always a lack of know-how on the part of the complainant.  Well, that’s almost true, TB was lacking in some respects, and it was lacking in our infrastructure as much as in TB.  Obviously, the lack of calendar integration was an issue.  Our calendar system was proprietary and TB (even with the Lightning plugin) wasn’t going to work with it.  You also had the personal address book and other configuration options stored on the desktop instead of the server.  For me, that was always less than ideal.

Enter the new hope, Zimbra.  Zimbra has been dubbed an Exchange killer and as such is supposed to allow you to do everything Exchange can do (and more) without having to run Exchange.  I like this idea (it’s the love of F/OSS that pleases me here) and for the most part, Zimbra fits the bill (this isn’t going to be a review of Zimbra).

Now that we have back-end software that supports MAPI (Exchange protocol), I decided to give Outlook (OL) a shot.  As a matter of fact (and to save time and whining) I’ll just tell you, I recommended that we move to Outlook, got the approval and did the deed.  We’re all using it now and will be for the foreseeable future.

We use OL for a single reason, integrated mail, address book and calendar.  I had a difficult time opting to go with OL, it IS a weak mail client.  I have lists of annoyances, but this is because I like software that works, makes working with it easy and generally doesn’t suck.  That said, I’m betting that the integration will make the lives of my people easier.  In the end, that’s my job.  Find what’s best for them, show them how it’s best for them and make it work.

Time will tell what happens.  Today we’re still using the old calendar and client to access it.  Essentially all we’ve done is change mail clients.  Once the calendar service is rolled out, perhaps my dislike for outlook will ease up a bit.  I’m hoping so.

Oh and the results…  For the most part, people are completely indifferent to pretty OK.  To them it’s just email, click new, add address, add subject (sometimes), fill in the body and click send.  If it works, it’s good.  I have a few folks (more technical people) who realize that in the email department, we did downgrade, but they understand why and we’re changing how we do things to fit the OL way.

I hope to do some playing with folder sharing (something we couldn’t do with IMAP and TB) I’ll post about it and hopefully have some nice things to say :)

Stay tuned for Summer in Review, Episode 2: Attack of Dell Image Direct (note: titles are subject to change without notice).

Open Source IMAP and Mail Client Joy

Posted by on May 3, 2008 No comments

OK, so I had a fun ass day. Yesterday I sent a message to the GNHLUG folks so I could get a recommendation on an IMAP server. I got a few and had to decide between Dovecot and Courier. Both are open source solutions and the winner will be running on my Debian Etch (Linux for those that don’t know) box (which is in a VMware virtual machine).

I decided to implement IMAP so that I could hit my mail from multiple clients instead of just mutt. While I have no problem just using mutt, I can’t ask Natalie to. It’s a console program (no pretty clicky menus) and driven by keyboard shortcuts that have meaning for me and nobody else in the world. I have an email folder that gets all of the notifications of online statements from all of the people we have to give our money to each month. I want her to be able to look at it if she chooses. Yeah, I could forward messages to her mail account or go about this any other number of ways, but setting up a mail server gives me other benee’s and it’s just fun to play with this stuff.

I won’t bore you with the details of configuring the server or making the config changes I needed in my mail clients, but I will tell you that I went with Dovecot and that both mutt and Thunderbird are amazingly flexible and powerful tools. I loved them before, I want to marry them now.

Since I’ve been using mutt for a couple of years now, I’ve grown very accustomed to managing email from 9 accounts (and a lot of it) with folders in one program. I’ve got it set up so that a particular email address and PGP key is selected based on what folder I’m composing/replying to messages in. It’s VERY handy. I never have to worry about which email address is responding to what list or friend. As long as my mail filtering is working properly, my client does the work. That all probably sounds confusing, so as an example, if I’m replying to a message in my Gmail folder, then the program knows that I want to reply with my @gmail.com address and the corresponding PGP key. I wanted the same capability in my GUI client. Enter Thunderbird and the “Enigmail” and “Folder Account” add-ons. It allows me to do just that, I simply need to select which identity to assign to a particular folder and I’m done. It really is that easy. It takes a few minutes to configure your identities and the GPG keys that go with them, a few changes to folder properties and BAM!

Folks, try doing that with Outlook. I’ll wait… Oh you couldn’t? Not surprising, MS doesn’t think you want to use PGP so it’s not an option. Never mind how common and effective it is. You’ll have to go out and buy PGP Desktop. No thanks, I’ll stick with the open source programs that have great devs & users who contribute to the project. The combination just produces far superior tools. That’s *almost* all from the Outlook bashing front for today, but there’ll prolly be more later. I’ve been using it at work for a few weeks now and it SUCKS. The ONLY thing it does right is integrate mail and calendaring if you have a MAPI backend, other than that… meh. There, now that really is the last of the OL smash for today.

So I now have all I wanted from my mail server and I’m super pleased. It took almost no time to set up. It would have gone even faster if I had any sed or shell scripting skills. Ahh well, something to work on.

Safe(er) Browsing

Posted by on February 14, 2008 No comments

Soooo, you’ve been using IE to visit sordid sites and now your machine is fouled up with all sorts of malware. This mess was avoidable, so clean your machine and put on a browser prophylactic before indulging in your favorite solitary past times again…

What you’ll need:

SeaMonkey
NoScript
MultiZilla/MultiViews [optional]

Overview:

We’re going to be installing the SeaMonkey (SM) browser and it’ll be used to view sites that you don’t trust (you decide what that means in this instance, I’ll define it as anything that would appall your mother). NoScript and Multizilla are add-ons for SM, NoScript will prevent web pages from running scripts (java, etc) and potentially mucking up your machine, Multizilla will give SM some extra clean-up options.

01: Installing SeaMonkey

Download and install SM, I opted to install only the browser, you can perform a complete install if you want to check out all of the open source tools provided in the suite. I also opted not to use Quick Launch.

Following the installation, SM will launch and ask if you want to make it your default browser, answer No.

02: Enhancing/Protecting SeaMonkey

Using SM, open http://noscript.net/getit and click the "Install Noscript latest version*" link. You will be asked if you want to install the software, you do, click the Install button. You will be asked if you want to install NoScript to your profile, click OK. You should see a dialog explaining that NoScript has been successfully installed and will be available to you when you restart the browser. Click OK to dismiss the notification.

Still using SM, open http://multizilla.mozdev.org/installation/installation.html. This page can be a little confusing, don’t install the experimental nightlies, you want to scroll down until you see "Free MultiZilla [Installation] or [Download]", click the Installation button, you will again be asked if you want to continue, click the Install button. The next dialog will tell you to "Select OK, for a single user installation or Cancel, for a multi-user installation", click the OK button. If there are no problems, you’ll be told the install was a success and to restart your browser, click the OK button to dismiss the notification.

03: Configuring SeaMonkey

Close all open SM windows (if you opted to install and use Quick Launch you’ll want to close out of that as well). Now start SM again. It’s going to start with an open sidebar (F9 or View > Show/Hide > Sidebar to kill it) and some extra tool bars which I tend to hide (F12 to hide the MultiZilla bar & F1 to hide the Personal bar).

Now to configure MultiZilla: Choose Edit > Preferences select MultiZilla and click Open Preference Manager. Select the Privacy header and put a check into the boxes next to the options below:

  • Clear disk cache on exit
  • Clear location bar history on exit
  • Clear global history on exit
  • Clear all cookies on exit
  • Clear download history on exit
  • Clear all form data on exit

Now select the Sessions header, on the Save Behavior tab, choose Don’t Save Sessions, on the Restore Behavior tab choose Don’t Restore Sessions.

Note: There are other settings you can tweak to manage cookies and other content both in MuliZilla prefs and SM prefs. It’s up to you how paranoid you want to be.

04: Start Browsing

At this point we’re ready to go. SeaMonkey will clear its cache, history, etc when you exit the program and all scripts are disabled on all pages. You’ll notice that when you go to a page that has a script, a yellow notification bar will open in the bottom of your browser window, in that bar there’s an Options button. Clicking it will allow you to grant that site the ability to run scripts either permanently or temporarily, that way if you really NEED some functionality and NoScript blocks it, you can allow it.

Notes:

From time to time, SeaMonkey, NoScript and MultiZilla will let you know that there’s an update available for them. I would suggest installing the updates as they present themselves. They can add functionality and security fixes.

I’m not promising that this will keep your machine free and clear of malware, but it goes a long way to prevent infection. It’s certainly safer than using IE (switch to Firefox already!). YMMV.

While this was aimed at Windows users, NoScript and MultiZilla work just as well on the Linux release of SeaMonkey, don’t forget to install them if that’s your OS of choice :)

Real Player Smacked (/me points and laughs)

Posted by on February 1, 2008 No comments

http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=845

Real Player got a slap in the mouth from stopbadware.org. I can’t think of a mainstream program that deserves it more! I’ve had many an issue with the application acting like it owns MY computer in the past. I love to see bad/annoying programs punished. :)

Long ago I found Real Alternative and I’ve never once looked back or found a single real media file I couldn’t play. If you dread the Real headaches, check out the alternative.

There’s a QuickTime alternative as well, I use it on any Windows machine that has no need for iTunes. Both of the alternatives are great projects and those of you who detest overbearing software owe it to yourself to give them a look. That said, you’ll be responsible for keeping them up to date. There’s no automatic update programs for these solutions (gotta take the good with the bad).

Why?

Posted by on January 10, 2008 1 comment

EDIT:  Above was a link to a Knight Rider 2008 trailer on youtube which is no longer available; if you really need to see something similar go to http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Knight+Rider+2008&search_type=

Was this necessary?

At least they aren’t trying to pass it off as a new version of the original, it’s not Michael Knight and it’s a new KITT (Knight Industries Three Thousand). When will they learn that sometimes it’s best to leave things as is. There’s a longer clip available here for those interested.

Long live the Hoff!

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