JasonSamuel.com

A simple way to test if your MTA (mail transfer agent such as Exchange) is accepting email is to build the message by hand and watch the response codes from the server.  You can run this from the server console from a command prompt or remotely if you have the SMTP port to the server open.  Remember, once you are in the telnet session, don’t use backspace if you misspell something!  You’ll get an unrecognized command error if you do.  Just press enter and retype your command correctly if you do misspell something.

telnet localhost 25

This will open a telnet window to the server on SMTP port 25 and the server in return will send a 220 response code, the FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name), mail server version, and typically a time stamp as well.  Next you type:

helo

The mail server will respond with 250 response and it’s FQDN and say “Hello”.  You can also use:

ehlo

There is no difference using the commands except that EHLO returns info about the mail server’s capabilities along with the 250 response code such as the maximum SIZE of a messsage for example.  It’s useful to see exactly what your mail server is going to accept from a client.  EHLO is the more recent command by the way.  Pretty much all MTAs out there are going to accept either command nowadays.

This means the mail server is ready to accept more commands.  Now it’s time to begin composing your email:

mail from: joeblow@gmail.com

You should get a 250 response code and say the Send is OK.  Now type who you are sending it to:

rcpt to: joeblowsfriend@gmail.com

You will get a 250 response for the email address.  You can add more recipients by just typing additional lines like above.  Next it’s time to build the body of the message.  Type:

data

and you will get a 354 response code saying you can begin input.  First type a subject line for your message:

subject: Test email

Remember, type this on the very first line and then press <Enter> twice.  Now you can start typing your message body.  Once you are done with your message body, press <Enter> to start a new line and type nothing on this line except for a period.  Then press <Enter> again and you will exit out of the message body and immediately submit the email to the MTA’s queue for delivery.  You should get the test email within seconds if your mail server is working properly!  Make sure to check your Junk E-mail folder just in case your mail server marks your test email as spam.  To exit your telnet session, just type:

quit

and press <Enter> and you’re done.  Simple, right?

Sometimes you may inherit a MySQL databse server and have no credentials to access anything.  None of the default accounts work.  Your only option is to reset the root user account password.  This is very easy to do.

1. Open up Windows Task Manager and stop the mysqld.exe (MySQL daemon) process.
2. Open up Computer Management > Services > and stop the MySQL service if it isn’t already stopped.
3. Open up a command prompt and go to your MySQL bin folder, for example:

 C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.1\bin

then type in:

 mysqld.exe –skip-grant-tables

this will restart the MySQL daemon process.

4. Now type in:

 mysql.exe -u root

and it should log you right in as the root user without having to specify a password.

5. Now you need to reset the password.  Type:

 UPDATE mysql.user SET Password=PASSWORD(‘MyNewPassword’) WHERE User=’root’;

You can change the password to whatever you want.  I have set it to “MyNewPassword” above.

6. Now type:

 FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

and you’re done!  Try logging in using your new credentials and it should work just fine.  Don’t forget to verify that your MySQL service has been restarted.

If you’ve ever used Urchin 6 for web analytics (Google’s pay for version of Google Analytics aimed at enterprises), you have probably seen profiles stuck in a “Running” state.  If you hit Run Now, you get this error message:

12008 – Action: Failed to cancel urchin process.

If you try to reschedule the profile, you get this error message:

12007 – Action: Failed to add profile to the scheduler queue. The profile is already in the queue.

This happens because Urchin’s scheduler is very sensitive to server reboots.  If you have jobs scheduled to run at night and let’s say you push patches to the server and reboot in the middle of the night, it can cause this error to appear on some of your profiles.  You get these errors because the log processing engine and scheduler never received the proper exit signals which means there will be database entries in the MySQL database that will be in an inconsistent state.  When the server boots back up, the log processing engine cannot pick back up where it stopped and the web GUI will show the profile is “Running” even though it is not.

The quick solution for this is to navigate to your Urchin bin folder via command prompt.  Here is an example path:

C:\Program Files\Urchin6\bin

then type:

urchinctl stop

which will stop all Urchin processes.  Then open up MySQL Command Line Client and type:

use urchin;
delete from uprofiles_queue;

This switches the database to the urchin database and deletes all running profiles.  Now if you go to to the web GUI under Profile Task Scheduler, you will see everything looks normal.  Now trying running the job again and it should work.  You should get a message saying:

12009 – Action: Profile has been queued to run. Please check the Profile Task History screen for status and runtime output.

Now don’t forget to restart your Master and Slave scheduler services or the job will remain in a queued state until they are back up:

urchinctl start

Now verify the job is actually running properly by clicking the green “Running” link for the job and you should see it processing the logs.