admin

Updating Microsoft Silverlight on any number of machines

Microsoft Silverlight patching script

Here’s a handy little M$ $ilverlight updater script you can use. I had a few clients on version 4, then one got prompted for a site they use to “Install Silverlight”. If they didn’t they couldn’t use the site, odd thing was they already had it installed! Apparently, the real problem is they wanted a more current version. Understandable I guess. Here’s a system startup script you can apply via Group Policy to machines as they startup. If it doesn’t find version 5 then it installs it, if it does find version 5 it ends.

I won’t explain too much, I assume you can modify the network paths to your environment and don’t need much hand holding :P

Download link for Silverlight version 5 <– There

Remember too you need the “filever.exe” file to check file versions via the command line. Search my site or the InternetS for the download.

Put the below in a batch file (filename.bat).

@echo off
:: SilverLight v5 installer

:: Note that a value of 0 = true, value of 1 = false

echo Checking to see if you have Silverlight installed…
if exist “%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Silverlight” goto filever
if exist “%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Silverlight” goto filever
goto end

:filever
:: V5 checker
“\\yourserver\yourshare\filever.exe” “%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Silverlight\sllauncher.exe” | findstr /C:”5.”
“\\yourserver\yourshare\filever.exe” “%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Silverlight\sllauncher.exe” | findstr /C:”5.”
echo Error value is %errorlevel%
if %errorlevel% EQU 0 goto end

:: x86
“\\yourserver\yourshare\filever.exe” “%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Silverlight\sllauncher.exe” | findstr /C:”4.0″
echo Error value is %errorlevel%
if %errorlevel% EQU 0 goto end
echo Upgrading Silverlight…
\\yourserver\yourshare\silverlight /q
goto end

“\\yourserver\yourshare\filever.exe” “%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Silverlight\sllauncher.exe” | findstr /C:”4.1″
echo Error value is %errorlevel%
if %errorlevel% EQU 0 goto end
echo Upgrading Silverlight…
\\yourserver\yourshare\silverlight /q
goto end

:: x64
“\\yourserver\yourshare\filever.exe” “%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Silverlight\sllauncher.exe” | findstr /C:”4.0″
echo Error value is %errorlevel%
if %errorlevel% EQU 0 goto end
echo Upgrading Silverlight…
\\yourserver\yourshare\silverlight /q
goto end

“\\yourserver\yourshare\filever.exe” “%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Silverlight\sllauncher.exe” | findstr /C:”4.1″
echo Error value is %errorlevel%
if %errorlevel% EQU 0 goto end
echo Upgrading Silverlight…
\\yourserver\yourshare\silverlight /q
goto end

:end
echo The glass is either half empty
echo or half full :P

Note that the “silverlight.exe /q” is a quite install, the “/qu” switch is a “quiet uninstall” so technically to be cleaner you’d want to “uninstall” your old version then install the new version but it’s only SilverLight so who cares? :P For a slicker script you could also do a mashup of another script I have that detects architecture which would then negate the need to check both the Program Files AND Program Files (x86) folders but I didn’t do it like that because I tweaked an existing script and didn’t want or need to reinvent the wheel.

“Technically” you probably do want to do the quiet uninstall of the old version just to keep consistency and to keep a tidy group of hosts but…it’s a free world…I think.

Ideally, to be completely strict you’d detect architecture (32 bit or 64 bit), then check version, then uninstall if necessary, then call your installer for the latest version.

Command line Window service control – SC Command Line

Command line disabling of Windows Services

Here’s a handy little script you can put in a group policy system startup process to disable services on mass. This is definitely handy to keep any number of systems (if they listen!) with a unified configuration. You can use this for any number of services, here I’ve chosen one I don’t need on some systems I manage because I don’t have WPAD Proxy detection needs.

The “sc” command in Windows lets you interface with the “Service Controller”, it’s the area on Windows where you see a list of services you can stop, restart, disable, etc, etc.

What this script does is:

1 – Queries for a particular service to see if it’s on or off, to find the name of the service you want you can go into services in the traditional way (GUI) or use “sc query” then hit enter. You might want to redirect that to a temp file for easy reading, “sc query > c:\temp\sc.txt” or something like that, then go open the sc.txt file for your list. It might take some experimenting but if you look at the Win HTTP Auto Proxy Service and double click it in the GUI you’ll see which fields you’ll need to make your own script.

2 – If it’s off, the script moves to the next command or ends however, if it’s on, the error you get is “0”. It then goes to the disable command and then stops the service. I’ve found it can’t query the service if it’s already disabled, thus your errorlevel would be 1 for off and move on in the script anyway.

3 – The commands “sc query” piped into the “findstr” looks for a particular string. I don’t think those have space in them but if they do there’s a findst /C:”Service with space” command you could do. The “Service with space” being the actual string you’re looking for. I didn’t confirm the “/C:” part but I’m almost certain from memory since I’ve used it LOTS of times in my batch files and scripts for finding the exact string syntax I was looking for. So the “sc query” with a findstr pipe finds the exact service you want to target. Furthermore, the “sc config” configures that service, make sure you have a space between the “=” and the action (disable, start, manual, etc) or it won’t work. The “net stop” just stops the service.

sc query | findstr WinHttpAutoProxySvc
:: 0 = on, 1 = off
if %errorlevel% EQU 0 goto on

:off
echo %errorlevel%
echo the service is off
goto 170
:: goto 170 was goto end
:on
echo %errorlevel%
echo The service is on
echo Turning the service off, one moment…
sc config “WinHttpAutoProxySvc” start= disabled
net stop “WinHTTP Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Service”

This might help you if you’re rolling out machines or you want to control services on remote machines with a system startup script. You can also do an sc query or other sc actions directly on remote machines. That’s something I haven’t touch on here but might be handy. You can also do this from the GUI which is where I usually do it from by connecting to remote machine or I’d use psexec to bring up a remote command shell then use the “net” command like in this script, “net stop”, “net start”, etc. As usual, there are many ways to skin this cat but this is a very clean way to centralize which services you’re running or aren’t running on machines. OH! I almost forgot! You can also just use Group Policy to manage services but I’ve found that to be a bit convoluted at times, one reason is if the services DOESN’T exist on the server it won’t show up in your GPO because the server doesn’t know about it. So if you have some special app on your workstations but not on your server the above method is one of the ONLY methods you have to fall back on to control that service ;)

Good luck and let me know if you have any questions. I’m available for consulting opportunities, remote tech support, systems management help, systems architecting, you name it!

Zarafa install, configure and my personal notes

A colleague of mine told me about Zarafa. I have administered both a Kerio mail server and a Zimbra mail server. Both have their pluses and minuses.

I thought I’d check out Zarafa and here are my quick thoughts:

~~No web gui to admin the server (minus~~) | Correction! There is NOW z-admin, a web interface for administering the server. At the time of my initial blog this was not available.
~~Command line only administration (minus)~~ You can still use command line but most everything seems to be working well with admin tasks from the z-admin web interface.
Good Outlook Webaccess “like” interface (neutral)
Quick, you don’t need to throw a ton of resources at this server for it to perform, they do have server sizing requirements in their documentation
Open Source platform, it’s my opinion that this is a BIG plus! :-)
Optional paid support (plus)
Value, they’re not gouging you with licensing fees (big plus)
Multi server cluster options (huge plus)
Using Z-Push something they develop you can sync phone’s, I’ve had mixed results but works well when it works
…more to come when I find them.

Here are my install notes:

Install Ubuntu 12.04.x LTS <– assuming you know how to do this :P

Open a terminal and elevate your privileges: sudo -i

apt-get install mysql-server-5.5 libmysqlclient18

apt-get install apache2-mpm-prefork libapache2-mod-php5

* Follow any prompts accordingly like setting hostnames, usernames, passwords, etc

Cleanup the install, if I didn’t do this the Zarafa install doesn’t “finish” and leaves some dirty packages in /etc/init.d/ with names like “/etc/init.d/zarafa-dagent.dpkg-new”. Run this command, it won’t hurt even if you don’t need it but when I ran it (because I think there was an error that said to do so) it fixed the *.dpkg-new” business. Run: “apt-get -f install“

I like to use a “working directory” called /var/ftp. If you want to do that you can do a “mkdir /var/ftp” then “cd /var/ftp”. We need to now get the installer package. View this site and pick your poison: http://download.zarafa.com/community/final/7.1/7.1.0-36420/

A download command I did from 12.04.x server (which is no desktop GUI, command line only) was: “wget http://download.zarafa.com/community/final/7.1/7.1.0-36420/zcp-7.1.0-36420-ubuntu-12.04-x86_64-free.tar.gz”

Now extract that (if you’re already cd’d to /var/ftp) the command I used was: “gunzip tar -xvf zcp-7.1.0-36420-ubuntu-12.04-x86_64-free.tar.gz”. That takes care of the gz piece, which dumps it to a .tar file, now run: “tar -xvf zcp-7.1.0-36420-ubuntu-12.04-x86_64-free.tar.gz” or if you want to be slick you can do “tar -xvf zcp*.gz”

You HAVE to change permissions on the directory for some reason or you get an error that says: “missing helpers.inc” when you’re clearly not so, do a: chmod -R 777 tar -xvf zcp-7.1.0-36420-ubuntu-12.04-x86_64-free <– Remember though, your version at the time you rad this might be different so it might not be 7.1.0-xxxxxxxxx.

This leaves a directory called “tar -xvf zcp-7.1.0-36420-ubuntu-12.04-x86_64-free” with world readable and world writable (you can delete it later when we’re done). “cd” into it: cd tar -xvf zcp-7.1.0-36420-ubuntu-12.04-x86_64-free.

Lets now “install” by running: ./install.sh

* Follow the prompts for hostname, etc. It checks the dependencies of like Apache, MySQL, etc.

Now, we’re hardly over. One of the cons although some might think this is a benefit is…that Zarafa doesn’t install an SMTP server. That seems weird BUT on a good note it means you can use one of many mail servers that has an SMTP service! They have a “how to” with Postfix (my choice), Qmail, Procmail, Exim4 and XMailServer here <– Click that link to their wiki.

* Don’t forget to add the local account (A local UNIX account called “vmail”) according to the WIKI.

To make this work with Postfix on Ubuntu 12.04.x all you do is run this command: apt-get install postfix

Follow and answer the prompts and it does everything. What you have to do now is add aliases. If you don’t do the postfix integration piece (or your mail server of choice) then you’ll get an error that says:

Relay access denied or you might also see this in a test email that bounces back “Relay access denied (state 13)”

That’s because you don’t have aliases setup correctly. To do this (if you’ve followed the tutorial on Zarafa MTA integration on the above link) simply add your users to these aliases files:

nano /etc/aliases

* add your user like:

rwolf: rwolf@xyzdomain.com

nano /etc/postfix/

Find the line: mydestination =

Add your domain like this (there are probably existing domains, just append the list):

mydestination = xyz.com, abc.com, xyz.net, abc.net

Then restart your services for postfix:

/etc/init.d/postfix reload
/etc/init.d/postfix restart

Now do some testing and you should be good to go!

Further things you will want to do is add spam filtering and spam control. Yet ANOTHER downside to Zarafa is, unlike Kerio and Zimbra there isn’t even a basic spam filter installed. I guess that’s why their download is only 41 meg :P. I would suggest that if Zarafa wants to play with the big boys they need to:

Roll up more options for an easier install that includes Apach, MySQL and a mail server
Include a spam filter
Get a web admin GUI, even skilled admins would have jitters about implementing a mail system without one…but not me because I love a technical challenge ;-)

Feel free to let me know if you have any questions or issues and if the notes need some updating. It’s not exhaustive but should get anyone who knows basic stuff off the ground and to fix most of the issues you might have.

I’ve got the community edition installed and I’m liking what I see!

* IMAP SSL notes:

If you want to secure pop and imap with ssl this is what you do. Thanks for Stan Barber for his clear, concise tutorial here!

* Note, you want to leave out the -des3 part if you don’t want your server pem to have a password ;)

Finally, once all your certs are created, you should have a “server.key” and a “server.crt”…that’s what I named mine in the commands. Do a:

nano /etc/zarafa/server.cfg

In the section: ssl_private_key_file = /etc/zarafa/…wherever_your_key_is/server.key

In the section: ssl_certificate_file = /etc/zarafa/..wherever_your_key_is/server.crt

Restart the gateway server: /etc/init.d/zarafa-gateway restart

Check the log: tail /var/log/gateway.log

You should see an exit, shutdown complete, starting with no errors like “Error loading SSL context”. If you see the Error loading SSL context you’re using bad certs OR you’re pointing it at the wrong files and I’d start over :P

This did in fact stump me for a few hours because even though I had the certs created correctly. I had a boat load of certs following an error so I created more. That wasn’t the problem at all, it was the fact I was pointing it at a PEM file rather than a CRT file in the ssl certificate section. The REASON why I was using a PEM file in that section is because the default put in there by Zarafa as “default” syntax is in fact .pem not .crt…that threw me off :). You need a certificate there not a pem. UGH! After doing the above my pop and imap are now pops and imaps!

* Hey! Another “update”. When I switch from a single mode server to a “hosted” server meaning multi-tenant or multi-occupancy (so xyz.com, abc.com, def.net, etc all hosted on the server BUT kept separate in a “company”) I couldn’t deliver mail to the inbox. As soon as I switch back to “hosted = false” in the /etc/zarafa/server.cfg file it worked and mail would be delivered. This is discussed here on a Zarafa Community Forum but when I read it the other day I didn’t fully understand what it was talking about. After digging into the problem, reviewing the MTA setup I finally got it!

In these files:

/etc/postfix/main.cf

/etc/postfix/master.cf

You need to change this line:

main.cf = mailbox_command = /usr/bin/zarafa-dagent “$USER”

master.cf = flags= user=vmail argv=/usr/bin/zarafa-dagent ${user}

To this line:

main.cf = mailbox_command = /usr/bin/zarafa-dagent “$recipient”

master.cf = flags= user=vmail argv=/usr/bin/zarafa-dagent ${recipient}

I just noticed this but in the user spot I guess case sensitivity doesn’t matter :P. You think it would on a Linux server though?

MUCH THANKS TO blackjack97 on the forum! You’re my hero :) He/She was the poster with the fix, much props!

Owncloud Updating made somewhat easy :P

Owncloud Updating made somewhat easy

Here’s a small process I made to make an Owncloud Server update take less time, I’m currently using Ubuntu 12.04. Owncloud is a DropBox alternative, the OpenSource version doesn’t have SSL enabled currently by default, you’d need, to add it. I haven’t done so yet but I believe there are tutorials and how to’s.

What you need to do:

I usually use a working directory, I first started using a directory I created way back when I started learning Linux thanks to a tutorial and it stuck. I usually use /var/ftp. It doesn’t exist by default so you’d need to do a: mkdir /var/ftp if it doesn’t exist OR you can simply change the script / commands to suite your needs.

Commands:

cd /var/ftp

wget http://download.owncloud.org/releases/owncloud-4.0.7.tar.bz2

touch owncloud.update.sh

nano owncloud.update.sh

* Then paste the below into that owncloud.update.sh file

#!/bin/sh
tar jxvf owncloud-*.bz2
cp -r /var/www /var/ftp/www
rm -r /var/ftp/owncloud/config
# cp -r /var/ftp/owncloud /var/www <– This copies default /var/www/owncloud if you used the default
# install instructions, I changed it in my install to use the Apache www root folder since it’s a
# dedicated server.
# Uncomment appropriately
cp -r /var/ftp/owncloud/* /var/www
/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Then exit nano, I thin it’s usually control + x or control + alt + x.

I’d also do a manual copy of your /var/www. That’s usually the default Apache location. You can run:

cp -r /var/www /var/ftp/www.bkp

That will backup the /var/www contents to /var/ftp/www.bkp folder. After, you can confirm the /var/ftp/www.bkp contents…it might be good to do so. Even though the commands in the shell script do backup the directory to /var/ftp/www it’s always good when you first run something to be sure you back it up manually, manually check it and confirm. Taking this step might save headaches until you know the script works like it should. It’s possible your Apache doesn’t use /var/www/ as it’s directory!

So finally, run the script:

sh owncloud.update.sh

It should work like a charm…if you believe in charms that is ;)

You can confirm the upgrade took place by logging into your OwnCloud instance (usually http://yourserver if it’s in www like mine OR http://yourserver/owncloud). Then click on: Settings > Personal > Scroll down to the bottom, it should say something like:

ownCloud 4.0.7 (up to date)

If it doesn’t, to troubleshoot you can cd /var/www and then do an “ls” command to list the contents of the directory. See if you see any unusual folders. When I fist installed OwnCloud I installed it into /www/ so I could just go to my Apache www root by typing in http://yourserver.com however, when I first did an update I had my copy command incorrectly typed and copied the /var/ftp/owncloud folder into /var/www so it ended up being “/var/www/owncloud”. I essentially left my old version in /var/www and had the new version sitting in /var/www/owncloud. What I needed to do was then remove the /var/www/owncloud folder and recopy the contents of /var/ftp/owncloud into /var/www, then restart apache and it worked!

In the script you’ll need to figure out if you use the default /var/www/owncloud or if like me, you tweaked their install instructions to just use the Apache root www folder. If it’s a dedicated server I think it’s best to use /var/www.

Middle men and the cost of IT products

I’ve got a big beef with technology companies these days and it’s the involvement of more middle men so they can “grow the business”. Back in the late 80’s (when I was a wee pup of a lad) Dell Computer Corporation dealt directly with businesses and consumers. Dell direct! “You’re getting a Dell dude” and guess what, it’s not from a middle man but right from Dell dude! There were no middle men, it was great and what made Dell special among other tech companies doing the same thing like Gateway, HP, and IBM. Dell innovated, was in the right place at the right time with the dawning of the Internet (known by many things now like “the world wide web” or “the InternetS” or perhaps, “the Interweb”). The Internet helped Dell connect directly with their customers without the use of other distribution channels like resellers. Newegg.com for example is the epitome of a middle man. Thousands of products (including Dell computers sadly) by thousands of vendors. Sure it works but it doesn’t work well for me with some specialized IT products like software or integrated hardware. Newegg for me makes sense for parts but has certainly become more and Dell, well…they’ve gone backwards by expanding their distribution model that now includes middle men like Walmart. Yuck!

You know what a middle man does? It pushes the price up on many of the products and services we want to consume and shrinks the margins made by the manufacturer. Manufacturers like Dell though try to make it up on “volume”. Eventually though, as volumes decrease so do profits but I’m not sure they’ve realized this yet. As of late my biggest beef is with VMWare. More specifically, the Zimbra arm of the business know now as “VMWare Zimbra”. VMWare acquired Zimbra a few years ago. VMWare started growing quickly thanks in part to middle men. At one point VMWare products were a good value for money but when the middle men like Dell, HP, IBM, etc started reselling their products the prices went up and so did sales. They started selling more units thanks to their new distribution model, great for the short term. I suppose that’s what happens when you’re selling army quadruples in size, you sell more! I understand, VMWare had shareholders to please. Thanks to middle men and other market variables like share price and profits the prices on VMWare products went up. When prices go up, value for money goes down.

Sadly, VMWare is taking the Zimbra product in that direction. Since I’ve started working with Zimbra, they’ve been sold, prices have gone up and now they push you to distributors, resellers and hosting companies. It took me three weeks, several updated support tickets and patience to finally get a hold of a real honest to goodness, flesh and blood sales person. After emailing their sales staff I explained that I wouldn’t need to speak with them if their online portal was more clear and had better explanations. Apparently though I’m the only one in the world who was confused by their licensing model. Another poke in the eye is, they shared my contact information with a reseller who then pesters you about your upcoming renewal. So much for the privacy of my information :-)

Back to the irritating part of what VMWare is doing, they’re using middle men to distribute their product and grow the business. What happens to you and me as a consumer of their product? We pay more. Sadly, I might have to advise people to go use Kerio Connect rather than Zimbra since you can deal directly with Kerio, they have one product line with all the bells and whistles for half the price of Zimbra once you purchase the product and go on maintenance. Additionally, with Zimbra you have to buy 25 user blocks even if you just want to add one user thus wasting 24 licenses. With Kerio you buy licenses in blocks of 5, I like that granular approach and direct model.

I like Kerio because it does everything Zimbra does and just as well. You can even install it on an open source platform! You can deal with them directly with no middle men, they have just one product that’s all inclusive AND they’re a great value for money! I think I’ll be advising my clients in the future to dump Zimbra and migrate to Kerio hands down.

A small update! A colleague of mine showed me another alternative to Exchange and Zimbra. It looks promising and looks like a good value! It’s called Zarafa. I’ll update as I intend on using it. The small business edition which lets you use a ton of features, mobile sync, Outlook (if you care to use Outlook…I don’t) and much more is only $80 dollars Euro for a 5 pack per year. This looks promising!

Adobe Reader MSP installation script

Installing Adobe Reader MSP file Patch

If your interested in knowing more about Adobe Reader patching I have another post that discusses things in detail here with links to Adobe explanations and upgrade paths. They’re great links because you can download various patches right from their site on those pages without getting bumped to some other rediculous download page: Link

So, make an “updater.bat” file and copy the below data into it.

You’ll want to change a few things:

The “\\yourserver\someshare” to your actual server name and your server share where filever and Adobe Reader exist
Download filever; it’s how we check the file version that exists on the machine
Download the MSP and change the version of the patch below

The script:

@echo off

:: Checking to see if Adobe Reader 10 is installed
if exist “%programfiles%\Adobe\Reader 10.0” goto install
goto noexist

:install
echo Adobe Reader 10 is installed
echo Processing update…checking current version level
“\\yourserver\someshare\filever” “%programfiles%\Adobe\Reader 10.0\Reader\acrord32.exe” | findstr /C:”10.1.3.23″
:: Diagnostic echo to see result of the filever call
:: echo %errorlevel%
if %errorlevel% EQU 0 goto end
echo Installing the patch…
msiexec /update “\\yourserver\someshare\Adobe Reader\reader_10_1_3\AdbeRdrUpd1013.msp” /quiet
goto end
:noexist
echo Adobe Reader 10 doesn’t seem to be installed
echo thus we don’t need the patch!
goto end
:end

Now, if you put that into a Group Policy under a system startup it’ll update your instance of Adobe Reader to whichever version of the Adobe MSP you’re pushing…UNLESS of course you didn’t read my other post about patching because there are exceptions when patching security patches or quarterly patches :P

Zebra Printer, Z4M Parallel Printer Cable Problems

Zebra Z4M printer problems

This is just a short blerb but I went 15 rounds with a Zebra Z4M (now an unsupported legacy product) today and I finally dealt it a knock out blow! I literally spent about four hours off an on with this issue. I don’t know which firmware it was on BUT here’s what happened:

NIC installed – it was a small daughter board on the mainboard inside the unit, you can’t see it unless you unscrew and get into the side cover. It has a long 10 pin power cable and data cable that goes from the daughter board to the NIC which is about as small as a USB thumb drive that’s mounted on the back of the unit. I believe Zebra calls them “external”.

Parallel Port – on the main board and hadn’t been used ever.

The problem was even though I was using the correct driver, downloaded from zebra.com it didn’t seem the PC was communicating with the unit. There was no USB option. After fiddling with it for HOURS I popped the daughter board out and off of the main board. Up till this point I tried everything to configure the unit from the front console panel (which is a nightmare until you figure out what it’s doing!).

It turned out that once I got that external NIC unplugged from the unit and power cycled it the PC would THEN communicate with the printer and worked wonderfully! So, if you have a parallel connection NOT working see if you have a NIC installed on the unit like I did. Get into the unit, unplug the external NIC, unmount it from the main board, power cycle and retry.

Definitely let me know if this helped you because I didn’t find a solution online, like the majority of what I post nobody’s posted it or made it easy to find.

BASH script for loop to read a file and do an rDNS lookup using NSLOOKUP

Bash + For Loop + File Input = HOTNESS!

I’ve got a particular need for a client’s sales purposes to do reverse lookups and actually tell us what the host name is of each visitor to their website. Think of it as a specialized web report. Sure, they use Google Analytics but that only tells you what country people are from, or city or even other details like operating system, is it a mobile phone (?), etc, etc. I guess that can all be useful but there’s MORE useful information found in a reverse DNS lookup from a sales perspective. Those other details might tell you what alternative languages to make your website in if you’re getting hits from other countries or what browser to develop your site for (IE, FF, Chrome, Safari, etc or even mobile browsers, etc).

Note that I did this in Windows using nslookup but I needed to do it on Linux, I chose to use a bash script because the web server is a Linux web server (and rightly so!).

So why rDNS lookups? Now the investigation begins ;)

For example:

If you have an IP address in a log, someone from said IP address visited your site but who? You can run this command on your server (and I use my own server and IP address to do this):

nslookup -x 67.219.197.229

That’s a server I host websites on for clients.

;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 44744
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 2

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;229.197.219.67.in-addr.arpa. IN PTR

;; ANSWER SECTION:
229.197.219.67.in-addr.arpa. 43200 IN PTR bigboy.flophost.com.

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
197.219.67.in-addr.arpa. 43200 IN NS ns1.ctstelecom.com.
197.219.67.in-addr.arpa. 43200 IN NS ns2.ctstelecom.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns1.ctstelecom.com. 2435 IN A 64.136.224.18
ns2.ctstelecom.com. 2435 IN A 64.136.224.19

;; Query time: 78 msec
;; SERVER: 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1)
;; WHEN: Sat Jun 23 13:42:56 2012
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 157

Notice you get the hostname: bigboy.flophost.com, you also get the name servers and their IP addresses. So from a sales perspective if said customer from flophost.com visited my website a sales person could then determine if that person is a potential customer, if not it’s dropped and maybe they found us accidentally but maybe just maybe they are a possible customer looking at your widgets for sale. You might know this because I’d then go to their website. I’d see what they did as a business and if it’s related to the widgets or services I offer I might follow up with a phone call or an email.

Here’s my code ;)

#!/bin/sh
for ip in /var/ftp/ips
do cat $ip | nslookup -x > result.txt
done

The first statement: for ip in /var/ftp/is

For my testing I copied the log file into /var/ftp, it’s kind of a “working directory” for me. The word “ip” is a variable, it’s arbitrary and can be anything. I could have said: for cocopuffs in /var/ftp/ips. the “ips” is the file name, if it were “ips.txt” I would have put that in there, that’s the file we’re reading line by line.

I then do a “cat $ip”, the cat command is what’s reading the file and the “$ip” is the variable in the file that’s assigned on the previous line as “ip”. We’re saying, for every line of the ips file assign each line to the variable $ip because each line is different (probably), we then pipe (|) the command we want “nslookup -x” and redirect the results to a result.txt file. We can do a “>” to overwrite the file every time or a “>>” to continue appending to that file.

Once you have your file you can email it out, ftp it somewhere, make it available on their site for download (since it’s not really sensitive information…probably not since all IP’s, records, etc are “public record”). You could so other interesting things too like parsing the file and if it returns a subset of domain name extensions to put those somewhere differently. If for example you wanted all the Argentinian web visitors in the log to go to a separate file you can do that too. I don’t have a need for that at the moment so I don’t have that syntax to post…I’d have to figure it out ;)

Figuring this out probably took me HOURS of thinking, maybe an actual hour or two of DOING (testing different syntax’s, trying different code, looking online for help…no online help really though just stuff that pointed me in the right direction).

Let me know if you found this code snipped useful. I know others are looking for the syntax but finding it actually posted online is a another ballgame! Enjoy!

FireFox MIME type change – Zimbra, GMail, Yahoo, etc

Making a MIME addition for Zimbra in FireFox

I was looking for a way to “push” out a mime change to a number of users but didn’t have too much luck. ~~I haven’t written the script out yet BUT I might post it when I’m done~~ My working script / batch file for a user logon is posted below for your copying pleasure ;). ~~In the meantime~~ I did find the mechanism to update a users MIME type for mailto links in URL’s so if a user clicks on one it’ll prompt them which webmail client they want to use. The user can select it as their default mailto MIME type so when they click a mailto link it’ll open Zimbra.

First:

Find the mimeTypes.rdf file in your users (or your) profile directory. It’ll be something like: C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\%profile%.default

* %username% is your computer username
* %profile% is your FireFox profile, it’s a random bunch of characters

Second:

Edit the mimeTypes.rdf with a text editor, here you’ll put in your Zimbra mail server information:

* Now you want to drop this anywhere in the file after a </RDF:Description> line since that’s the end of the previous entry and edit the bold pieces below

<RDF:Description RDF:about=”urn:handler:web:https://mail.yourserver.com/zimbra/?view=compose&to=%s”
NC:prettyName=”Zimbra”
NC:uriTemplate=”https://mail.yourserver.com/zimbra/?view=compose&to=%s” />
<RDF:Description RDF:about=”urn:mimetype:application/java-archive”
NC:value=”application/java-archive”
NC:editable=”true”
NC:fileExtensions=”jar”
NC:description=”Executable Jar File”>
<NC:handlerProp RDF:resource=”urn:mimetype:handler:application/java-archive”/>
</RDF:Description>

Restart Firefox if you have it open, then test your mailto at this site: http://www.scottseverance.us/mailto.html

You “should” be able to distribute this file to all your users

I made my batch file, you’d put this in the startup script for your users via group policy:

@echo off
:: Checking for FF directory and if FF is installed
if exist “%ProgramFiles%\Mozilla Firefox” goto FF
:: 64 bit machines have this directory
if exist “%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Mozilla Firefox” goto FF
echo FF is not installed…
:: Also note that this isn’t doing any 64 bit stuff, I think the MIME file is architecture agnostic
goto end

:FF
:: Changing directories to the default FF profile directory
cd %APPDATA%\mozilla\firefox\profiles

:: Listing their randomly named profile folder
dir “%APPDATA%\mozilla\firefox\profiles” /AD /B > %TEMP%\profile.txt

:: Setting a FF directory variable based on their folder name
set /p ffdir= <%TEMP%\profile.txt

:: Note
:: Error = 0 for true
:: Error = 1 for false
\\yourserver.domain\netlogon\filever.exe “%APPDATA%\mozilla\firefox\profiles\%ffdir%\mimeTypes.rdf” | findstr /C:”26,558″
:: If the file is the one we want, the one we edited skip it it’s equal in size “EQU”, if not it backs up the file and then copies the new one
if %errorlevel% EQU 0 goto end
ren “%APPDATA%\mozilla\firefox\profiles\%ffdir%\mimeTypes.rdf” mimeTypes.rdf.bkp
copy \\yourserver.domain\netlogon\mimeTypes.rdf “%APPDATA%\mozilla\firefox\profiles\%ffdir%\”
del /f /q %TEMP%\profile.txt

:: Troubleshooting pauses now commented out, uncomment to troubleshoot and see output
::pause
:end
:: pause

* You need to drop your mimeTypes.rdf that you edited on a network share, I have a generic fake one in the code \\networkshare\networkdrive\…

* Also check the “| findstr” section, your file might be a different size than mine when you edit it. When I edited my MIME file for FF that’s the size it gave it and it’s how I distinguish it from the default file that’s in that directory. This way, if the correct file exists we simply exit and move on.

* You’ll also need “filever.exe” <– Download it there ;)

References:

Batch file read text from a file: http://forums.techguy.org/software-development/551867-batch-file-read-line-text.html

FireFox MIME Type Modification: http://kb.mozillazine.org/MimeTypes.rdf

Another method on the Zimbra forums that “works” it’s just not “automated” in any way but got me thinking: http://www.zimbra.com/forums/developers/19314-support-firefox-3-mailto-protocol-handler.html#post106937

Finally – leave a comment if this helped you out, worked for you or COMPLETELY messed your system up :P

Ubuntu System Information on logon – how to call it on purpose :P

How to call up Ubuntu system information summary

I thought I’d quickly throw this out there. When I log onto an Ubuntu server (10.04 LTS anyway) I see an interesting screen with:

System load: 0.26               Processes:           232
Usage of /:   82.3% of 526.50GB        Users logged in:     1
Memory usage: 12%                    IP address for eth0: x.x.x.x
Swap usage:   0%                 IP address for eth1: x.x.x.x

I found that interesting and useful so I was wondering how to call it up at any time. I found a howtogeek post here <–

That didn’t particularly help me much since I wasn’t trying to change the MOTD, I just wanted to figure out how it was generated and call it back up if I wanted to. What was useful were some of the comments. A user named “WIC” said:

“What worked for me (on Ubuntu 10.10 Server) was editing /etc/update-motd.d/00-header to fit my needs, and a chmod -x 10-help-text to get rid of that part..”

That’s exactly what I needed was a point in the right direction, I then did:

cd /etc/update-motd.d/

I noticed: 50-landscape-sysinfo -> /usr/share/landscape/landscape-sysinfo.wrapper

I then did: cat /usr/share/landscape/landscape-sysinfo.wrapper

…which revealed the script ;)

Looks like they grep your processor cpu information, processor load average but they also have a “/usr/bin/landscape-sysinfo” script. You can cat that too so you can see the python script but…if you want to call that handy system summary window up again simply run:

/usr/bin/landscape-sysinfo