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Archive for the category ‘ColdFusion’

The Asus Eee PC, Ubuntu, LAMP & ColdFusion

10th October 2008

asus-eeeI recently got an Asus Eee PC 1000H. For writing, travel, and learning Linux. I wanted to get Ubuntu working on it (a friend recommended it), the Apache/MySQL/PHP trinity (essential for work), and ColdFusion (not essential for work these days, but a few little apps I’ve written—for use locally—use CF).

There’s been a whole series of hoops to jump through. I’m no tech novice, but Windows and occasional Mac use has been my staple thus far. Of course you can’t do much in web development without knowing a bit of Linux at least; still, wrangling with various desktop issues can be a chore.

The web, or Google (if there’s a difference) is your friend. Finding a comprehensive tutorial that covers your precise situation is rare if not impossible; you need that familiar net skill of cobbling together varying perspectives and bits of advice into something that works for you. That said, I’ll point to this ACME Guide up-front as a fantastic source of information on getting web development stuff going.

I also picked up the O’Reilly Linux Pocket Guide. It’s a good little intro to the Linux environment as well as a useful reference point.

Anyway, here’s my summary of what I’ve learned. Hope it’s useful for you! (As ever, this information is used at your own risk. I can’t support you if stuff goes wrong—but do let me know if you know for sure I’ve, for example, mis-typed commands!)

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Permalink  |  Posted in Apache, ColdFusion, Linux, hardware  |  Comments closed  | 

Spamhaus.org and SMTP authentication

11th June 2007

Just solved a pesky email problem that was really vexing.

Sending email from my localhost web server (usually via ColdFusion apps), for testing and other purposes, has always worked swimmingly. Recently, however, emails sometimes didn’t send. A glance at my ColdFusion log files showed the error “Invalid Addresses”.

Some addresses from some of my domains have started to be used extensively for sending spam (by other people!), so I wondered whether I’d got blacklisted somehow.

A blacklist was involved, but not for addresses. A closer look at the CF error logs showed this:

Invalid Addresses; nested exception is: class javax.mail.SendFailedException: 550-xx.xx.xx.xx is listed at zen.spamhaus.org (127.0.0.11: 550 http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=xx.xx.xx.xx)

The x’d out bits are my current IP address. Spamhaus.org seems to be a large spam-fighting clearinghouse, with, among other things, IP blacklists. Looking up my IP address on their database found it listed.

The solution is to add SMTP authentication to your outgoing mail script. For ColdFusion, it looks something like this:

<cfmail to="user@domain.com" from="noreply@domain.com" subject="Message subject" server="smtp.domain.com" username="noreply" password="password">
	[message]
</cfmail>

(Obviously, with suitable bits substituted for your situation…)

Permalink  |  Posted in ColdFusion, email, spam  |  Comments closed  | 

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