Month: April 2008

How to Fix the Problem of an Album Appearing Multiple Times in the Zune Software

There is a problem with the Zune software in how it handles some albums. In particular compilation albums which contains songs from different artists. The problem is that the same album will appear many times in the album listing in the Zune software. This can be very annoying. To fix the problem of an album appearing multiple times in the Zune software perform the following steps:

  1. Download and install the free MP3Tag program
  2. Launch MP3Tag and navigate to the folder on the hard drive which contains your MP3 or .wma files.
  3. Select all files in the album
  4. Click the “Actions (Quick)” button
  5. Select action “Format Value”
  6. Select the value “BAND” in the top drop down box
  7. In the bottom text box, specify: %album%
  8. Click OK to commit the changes
  9. Relaunch your Zune software and now you should only see one listing for your album

Zunes

How to Install an ipsCA SSL Certificate in OS X

ipsCA is a company that sells SSL certificates. Their SSL certificates are recognized by all the major browsers so you don’t need to worry about manually installing additional Certificate Authority (CA) certificates into your users’ web browsers like you have to do with CA companies whose certificates are not included by default in the major web browsers. What is great about ipsCA is that they offer free 2 year SSL certificates for educational institutions such as Universities. If your domain ends in .edu then you qualify for a free 2 year SSL certificate.

ipsCA certificates are a little unusual in that you need to install two certificates onto your server before it will work. I couldn’t find a documented set of procedures for installing ipsCA certificates on a MacOS X 10.4 server so I wrote some up:

Installing an ipsCA SSL Certificate in OS X 10.4

Generate the CSR

  1. In Server Admin, select the server you would like to secure.
  2. Click “Settings” > “Certificates” tab > “Add(+)” button.
  3. A dialog box will appear to enter your certificate information. Please refer to vs7313 for detailed CSR requirements.
  4. Enter starting and ending validity dates.
  5. Select private key bit length size (1024 is recommended and required for three year certificates)
  6. Enter a passphrase (“password”) for your private key.
    • Apple recommends “use at least 20 characters, include mixed case, numbers and/or punctuation, have no characters repeat, and having no dictionary terms.”
  7. Click “Save”. Now, “Request Signed Certificate From CA” can be selected.
  8. A dialog box will appear. Drag the certificate icon onto your desktop. This will create your CSR file.
  9. copy and paste the text of the CSR file into the certificate request form on the ipsCA website.
  10. Submit the request and wait for ipsCA’s email response.

Import the Signed Certificate

  1. In Server Admin, select the server the certificate needs to go on.
  2. Click “Settings” > “Certificates” tab
  3. Highlight the certificate the signed certificate corresponds to.
  4. Click the “edit” icon.
  5. Click the “Add Signed Certificate…” button.
  6. Paste the contents of the signed certificate text file you received from ipsCA into the text box that appears. Press OK to import the signed certificate.
  7. Quit and restart the Server Admin app to make sure it refreshes the status of the signed certificate.
  8. When you try to edit the certificate all the fields should be greyed out to indicate the certificate is signed and the import was successful.
  9. You may need to redesignate the newly signed certificate in the web server and/or restart it before Apache will start using the newly signed certificate.

Install the ipsCA Intermediate Certificates

1. Copy the ipsCA intermediate certificates bundle file into the /etc/certificates/ directory on the web server. At the time of this writing this file was named “IPS-IPSCABUNDLE.crt. The file is available on the ipsCA website.

2. Change the permissions on the certificate bundle to “640”.

  • cd /etc/certificates
  • sudo chmod 640 IPS-IPSCABUNDLE.crt

3. Navigate to the folder /etc/httpd/sites/ and locate the .conf file that corresponds to the the SSL virtual host that the certificate belongs to. Usually the filename of the .conf file will be named in the format “someNumber_IPAddress_443_fullyQualifiedHostName.conf”

4. Once you locate the file, open it in a text editor at locate the part of the virtual host section that covers the SSL certificate settings. The section you are looking for will look something like this:

SSLEngine On
SSLLog "/var/log/httpd/ssl_engine_log"
SSLCertificateFile "/etc/certificates/www.foo.com.crt"
SSLCertificateKeyFile "/etc/certificates/www.foo.com.$
SSLCipherSuite "ALL:!ADH:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:+LOW:!SSLv2:+EXP$

5. Add the following setting in between the “SSLCertificateKeyFile” and “SSLCipherSuite” setting:

SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/certificates/IPS-IPSCABUNDLE.crt
  • When you are done the certificate section should looking something like this:
SSLEngine On
SSLLog "/var/log/httpd/ssl_engine_log"
SSLCertificateFile "/etc/certificates/www.foo.com.crt"
SSLCertificateKeyFile "/etc/certificates/www.foo.com.$
SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/certificates/IPS-IPSCABUNDLE.crt
SSLCipherSuite "ALL:!ADH:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:+LOW:!SSLv2:+EXP$

6. Save your changes and restart the web service. You should now be able to navigate to your SSL website and receive no “invalid” certificate errors. You can test your web server by using the ipsCA test website at: http://certs.ipsca.com/checkserver/

SSL Certificate

How To Manually Send Email Using Telnet to Check for Open Relays

Knowing how to manually send an email using TELNET rather than a traditional email application such as Microsoft Outlook is sometimes useful for troubleshooting or testing for an open mail server relay. In order to send email via TELNET you will need 3 things:

  • An active internet connection
  • The address of a mail server capable of sending email from you – usually provided by your ISP (e.g. mail.myisp.com)
  • A valid email address (e.g. [email protected])

How to Manually Send An Email Using TELNET

The first thing to do is to open a connection from your computer to your mail server.

telnet mail.myisp.com 25

You should receive a reply like:

Trying ???.???.???.???...
Connected to mail.myisp.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mail.myisp.com ESMTP Sendmail ?version-number?; ?date+time+gmtoffset?

You will then need to declare where you are sending the email from:

HELO local.domain.name

Don’t worry too much about your local domain name although you really should use your exact fully qualified domain name as seen by the outside world the mail server has no choice but to take your word for it.

This should give you:

250 mail.myisp.com Hello local.domain.name [ip.address.displayed.here], pleased to meet you

Now give your email address or some other email address that can be used with the mail server:

MAIL FROM: [email protected]

Should yield:

250 2.1.0 [email protected]... Sender ok

If it doesn’t please see possible problems below.

Now give the recipients address:

RCPT TO: [email protected]

Should yield:

250 2.1.0 [email protected]... Recipient ok

If it doesn’t see possible problems below.

To start composing the message issue the command:

DATA

If you want a subject for your email type:

Subject: your subject line here

then press enter twice

You may now proceed to type the body of your message. Example:

Hello world! I am the test email.

To tell the mail server that you have completed the message enter a single “.” on a line on it’s own.

.

The mail server should reply with:

250 2.0.0 ???????? Message accepted for delivery

You can close the connection by issuing the QUIT command.

QUIT

The mailserver should reply with something like:

221 2.0.0 mail.myisp.com closing connection
Connection closed by foreign host.

Possible Problems

Here are a list of problems you may encounter and their fixes:

501 [email protected]... Sender domain must exist

The domain that you are sending from must exist

503 Need MAIL before RCPT

A recipient has been specified before a sender.

550 [email protected]... Relaying Denied

The mail server has refused to relay mail for you, this may be for any number of reasons but typical reasons include:

  • Not using this provider for an internet connection
  • Not using an email address provided by the owner of the server.

Some Things to Watch Out For

  1. If you type too quickly, sometimes it won’t recognize your text
  2. The backspace key sometimes does not work with some telnet clients (even though it may seem as though it does). you can try the DELETE key instead.