Sending mail from CF through IIS SMTP on Windows Server 2008

I ran into a problem today on Windows Server 2008 where mail wasn't being sent from CF through IIS SMTP running on the same machine. The CF Administrator indicated that CF could connect well enough, but nothing was being sent.

Whenever I run into something like this, the first thing I try is a telnet session from the console. This lets me see the responses directly from the SMTP session. So, I went to a command prompt and typed "telnet." I was a bit surprised to find that telnet is no longer available by default, and you have to explicitly enable it as a Windows feature using the "Turn Windows Features on and off" option in Control Panel. I kind of like that - most people don't use telnet and it's a potential minor security issue - but I found it disconcerting for a minute. Fortunately, there are plenty of instructions on how to enable telnet in Windows Server 2008.

Once I installed telnet, I connected to localhost:

then tried to send an email, and had my suspicion confirmed: relaying was disabled.

From there, it was an easy process to enable relaying in the IIS 6 Management Console:

and I was all set! The moral of the story is, I guess, telnet is your friend.

Adobe Connect, Google Search, Drupal (More) Training and Events Announced for February 2012

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Adobe Connect odds and ends

Here are a bunch of items I ran into recently working with Connect.

Exporting meeting recordings from Connect 7: if you want to export meeting recordings from Connect 7 using the "Make Offline" feature, you must explicitly have permission to view the meeting. Recently, I attempted to export a recording using a Connect administrator account, and received some fairly obtuse error messages. Digging into the debug log (good thing I wasn't using a hosted account!) I was able to identify this as a permissions problem. Once I added myself as a meeting participant, I was able to generate the FLV file without any trouble. Alternatively, you can probably move the meeting recording to the content library before exporting it, but I didn't try that.

LDAP and manually-created administrator accounts: if you're using LDAP, and you manually create an administrator account from the console, you can't change your password later on. To "fix" this, I created a second account from the console with a different name and the strong password I wanted, logged in with the second account, deleted the first account, then changed the login name of the second account to the first!

Missing LDAP first name and last name attributes, and searching for users within the Connect admin console: The Users and Groups list, which is a Flash app, lets you scroll through users and groups (surprise!). However, if you have more than a handful of users or groups, scrolling through this list is very painful as it takes forever to update. Fortunately, there's a search button at the bottom, which lets you search for a user by first and/or last name. Great! Unfortunately, if you're using LDAP synchronization, it's possible you don't have first or last names for some (or all) of your users, just logins. Even more unfortunately, you cannot search for logins or any other attributes, just first and last names.

Enabling editing of attributes imported via LDAP: By default, if you use LDAP synchronization, you can't edit attributes that come from LDAP, which makes sense. In my current case, the customer wants to do this, though, as there are specific differences in the rules for storing attributes in LDAP vs this particular system - they're not allowed to store user names in LDAP, but are allowed to store them in Connect. (This is a slight oversimplification, but will do for now.) There is a configuration option to allow editing of these attributes in Connect. However, if you've already run your synchronization, this option won't work because of overall limitations in the number of database records that can be changed by a single operation in Connect! And because of the byzantine database structure of Connect, I'm reluctant to do much exploration on my own, so I'll be opening a support ticket. My guess is that the Connect guys will give me a database query I can run directly against SQL Server to solve this.

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Adobe Connect, LDAP, and Active Directory

If you're setting up Adobe Connect to use LDAP synchronization against Active Directory, don't forget (like I did) that AD has a 1,000 record default limit for a single LDAP query:

"If you find that the script is not running through all of your users properly and you have MS Active Directory + over 1000 users, this is because by default, MS AD only sends back 1000 users at a time." - http://docs.moodle.org/21/en/LDAP_authentication

 I forgot that, and wondered where all my users were! Then, I checked LDAP with my good friend JXplorer, which clearly showed me I was only able to fetch 1,000 records at a time. This limit can be changed in AD, but fortunately you can simply set a page size limit in Connect (Directory Service Settings ... LDAP Settings ... Connection Settings ... LDAP Entry Query Page Size Limit ). I set it to 999, which worked perfectly.

Adobe Connect, SSL and the stunnel service

Adobe Connect 8 uses stunnel for software-based SSL/TLS connections, and it's pretty easy to set up. However, there are a couple of gotchas.

First, you have to decide whether to use SSL/TLS for the web interface, for meetings, or for both. If you want to encrypt both, you'll need two IP addresses and two hostnames defined in DNS, which you may not have planned for in advance. If you want to encrypt just one or the other, though, the instructions in the documentation (PDF link) are just a tiny bit off. You'll need to comment out all the lines for the other service. For example, if I just want to encrypt the web interface, the items in the section [https-vip] will remain uncommented, but the items in the section [rtmps-vip] must be commented out for stunnel to start successfully - including the section header itself:

;[rtmps-vip]
; incoming vip for fms (This is to secure Meeting) IP address that resolves to meeting FQDN
;accept = 123.123.123.2:443

; When stunnel is on the same box, simply leave the below IP address as 127.0.0.1
; Send unencrypted request to 1935
;connect =127.0.0.1:1935

; Certificate information for Connect Meetings.
; This assumes you put the cert and key in the root folder of stunnel
;cert = CertificateNameHere.pem
;key = CerificateKeyNameHere.pem
;ciphers = ALL:!ADH:!LOW:!EXP:!MD5:@STRENGTH

Second, the documentation refers to a Start Menu item for the stunnel service. Unfortunately, this doesn't exist. Fortunately, it's easy to register stunnel as a service. Just switch to the stunnel directory, typically something like C:\Breeze\8.2.0.1\stunnel, then type

stunnel -install



This won't create the Start Menu item, but it will register the service and set it up to start automatically.

Edit: 2011-12-14

Also, if you change the IP address of your Connect server, you'll need to stop stunnel, edit stunnel.conf, and change the IP addresses for the external listeners:

accept = 123.123.123.2:443

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