Mail is one of the hardest services to manage. Actually, mail is pretty simple in and of itself: there’s protocols people use to access their mail (such as IMAP and POP), protocols used to communicate between mail servers and send mail (SMTP, SMTPS) and then there’s a database of mail and user information. In Mavericks Server, all of these are represented by a single ON button, so it really couldn’t be easier. But then there’s the ecoysystem and the evil spammers. As a systems administrator of a large number of mail servers, I firmly believe that there is a special kind of hell where only spam is served at every…
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Managing Lion Server's Adaptive Firewall From the Command Line
Previously, I had done an article on using the adaptive firewall in Mac OS x Server. But I hadn’t looked at controlling it from the command line yet. In Lion Server, the firewall automatically blocks incoming connections that it considers to be dangerous. For example, if a client attempts too many incorrect logins then a firewall rule restricts that user from attempting to communicate with the server for 15 minutes. If you’re troubleshooting and you accidentally tripped up one of these rules then it can be a bit frustrating. Which is why Apple gives us afctl, a tool that interacts with the adaptive firewall. The most basic task you can…
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Bypassing Exchange 2007's Content Filter
Exchange 2007 is often set to filter all spam and reject mail that is classified as spam. If you configure Exchange 2007 to do so then you still need an email address that does not get filtered. The reason is that in the body of your rejection emails, you need to provide a valid user with a means to contact you in order to get their mail through. To bypass the content filter for an email address can be done using a commandlet, Set-ContentFilterConfig. When using the Set-ContentFilterConfig you can use the -BypassedRecipients option to specify email addresses that the filter will not be applied to, which would then be…
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AppLocker
smart-x.com has a product called AppLocker, which can be used to restrict what programs that a Windows computer can open. Nice little product if you want an easy solution for application whitelisting that doesn’t require Active Directory.