Free SPF Filter for Microsoft Exchange

Found a cool filter for Exchange that allows SPF filtering.  This filter will become part of GFI mail essentials but at the moment is freeware!

http://www.michaelbrumm.com/smtpspffilter.html

It filters incoming mail and also tags the header.

Here's an eventlog picture:
(Oops - I lost it when I moved my blog - Sorry!)

Here's a header entry:
Received-SPF: none (chef.thefoleyhouse.ad: 212.87.86.80 is neither permitted nor denied by domain of listserve.novatech.co.uk) client-ip=212.87.86.80; envelope-from=bounce-eweekly_personalised-1486325@listserve.novatech.co.uk; helo=port-80.novatech.sc.newnet.co.uk;

SPF Testing

This is a good site to test your SPF records to see if they are correct:

http://www.dnsstuff.com/pages/spf.htm

SPF

Had a play with SPF (Sender Policy Framework) today. Enabled outbound SPF by creting the following DNS record for my domain (thefoleyhouse.co.uk) at http://www.freeparking.co.uk.

TXT "thefoleyhouse.co.uk" "v=spf1 a:smtp.ntlworld.com a:cartman.homedns.org mx -all"

This means that for "thefoleyhouse.co.uk" only smtp.ntlworld.com (my ISP relay server), cartman.homedns.org (my exchange box) and and servers marked in my mx records are allowed to send mail from my domain.

This is of course only enforced by receiving smtp servers that also use SPF. Now if only I could get plus.net to create this for my work domain we would be seeing a reduction in domain spoofing.

v5 Windows Update

Had a play with the new V5 windows update site which is being used to distribute Windows XP SP2 RC (amongst others).  It will only accept valid product keys so if you've used a pirate key or a self generated key then you're out of luck!

http://v5.windowsupdate.microsoft.com

Change Windows XP Product Key

Here's a neat script to change the Windows XP VLK Product key on an SP1 machine.

Save it as VLKeySP1.vbs and run it as "cscript VLKeySP1.vbs enter-your-new-product-key-here"

'
' WMI Script - ChangeVLKey.vbs
'
' This script changes the product key on the computer
'
'***************************************************************************
ON ERROR RESUME NEXT
if Wscript.arguments.count<1 then
   Wscript.echo "Script can't run without VolumeProductKey argument"
   Wscript.echo "Correct usage: Cscript ChangeVLKey.vbs ABCDE-FGHIJ-KLMNO-PRSTU-WYQZX"
   Wscript.quit
end if
Dim VOL_PROD_KEY
VOL_PROD_KEY = Wscript.arguments.Item(0)
VOL_PROD_KEY = Replace(VOL_PROD_KEY,"-","") 'remove hyphens if any
for each Obj in GetObject("winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}").InstancesOf ("win32_WindowsProductActivation")
   result = Obj.SetProductKey (VOL_PROD_KEY)
   if err <> 0 then
      WScript.Echo Err.Description, "0x" & Hex(Err.Number)
      Err.Clear
   end if
Next

Office 2003 SP1 Available

It's up for download at:
http://office.microsoft.com/OfficeUpdate/default.aspx
Also SP1 for Onenote and an updated Spam filter for Outlook are there.

A few problems

Time is wrong (despite changing time settings in web.config) and I need to edit the descriptions...
Time to edit web.config.
It wasn't web.config - It was in the admin/options pages.
Title, my display name and time should now be correct.

Blog off the ground!

I've managed to configure my server using the .text blog application from http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/Workspaces/workspace.aspx?id=e99fccb3-1a8c-42b5-90ee-348f6b77c407. Installation was pretty sweet except I needed to modify the example connection strings. They needed to have "Trusted_Connection=true" added.

Because I'm only running a single blog I had to make sure that the application name used in DotTextHelper was null, i.e. "" instead of MyBlog.

Final problem was that the new virtual directory did not have an aspnet_client. I just created a virtual directory pointing to wwwroot\aspnet_client.

I'm going to try linking this to Newsgator later.