Hunting the Wiley 404

I hate finding 404's in my web logs. There was a time when my logs were full of them. This was from carelessness and forgetfulness on my part as well as from simple typing mistakes by both me and others. I've cleaned up most of my own mistakes and done links or redirects for the mistakes of others. This has cut my error log down to about a third of 1% - that is, there's one entry in my error log for every 300 entries in the access log. Most of those are script-kiddie attacks: people looking for exploitable php or cgi scripts.

The tool that has been most helpful to me in cleaning up the real errors has been the Web Crawl report at Google's Webmaster Tools. They have offered the "not found" report for some time, but recently they added info about the source page - the page that led them to the 404 on your site. This makes all the difference in the world: if the offending page is on your own site, you can immediately fix it. If it's someone else's page, you can decide whether to put in a link or a redirect to handle it.

While the relative importance of inbound links for SEO has decreased, you certainly don't want to throw away whatever value a link could give you. As Matt Cutts said at Free links to your site:

Why would you care about this? The simple reason is that if someone is linking to a non-existent page on your site, it can be a bad experience for users (not to mention that you might not be getting credit for that link with search engines unless you're doing extra work). Some of the easiest links you'll ever get are when people tried to link to you and just messed up.

Absolutely true.

Finally, a new cell phone!

We don't normally use the alarm clock. Why should we? I always wake up early enough without it but if I do oversleep, so what? We seldom have to be anywhere early.

Today was an exception, though. I wanted to catch a 7:00 AM train so we had set the radio alarm. By chance it went off this morning exactly as the announcer intoned "Good Morning, I'm Bob Oates". I found that amusing for some reason so at least I started the day with a smile.

My wife brought me to the train with time to spare and the ride to South Station was uneventful. I got there about 8:00 AM with plenty of time to make a 9:00 AM meeting at Back Bay.

There are a couple of ways to get to Back Bay from South Station. You can hop an outgoing train that stops there; you can take the subway (but you have to make a change at Downtown Crossing). You can also walk. It's a couple of miles, but I had plenty of time and I like to walk.

I forgot how damn cold it was.

I regretted my decision almost immediately. I had to keep switching my computer bag from hand to hand to let the free hand have a few minutes of pocket time. I couldn't think of a way to get my head and face into my pocket, though, so I quickly developed a headache and face pain. Oh, well: what doesn't kill us makes us stronger..

A Dunkin Donuts came into view. Too soon, though: if I went in then, I'd still be a long, long way from Back Bay. I had better wait for the next one, I thought..

Except there was no next one. Is it possible there is not a single other Dunkin Donuts all along Essex and Boylston Streets? If there is, I missed it. My fingers hurt, hurt, hurt.

As I approached the Prudential Center, I pulled out my cell phone to check the time. My frozen fingers fumbled the job, the phone bounced down the sidewalk ahead of me. When I picked it up, it had shut off. Fearing the worst, I tried turning it on.. to my delight it responded but indicated that it had a very low battery charge. Impossible! I had left it charging overnight at home, had not even used it yet today, how could it be low? Well, yeah, I did let it smash to a brick sidewalk, it had bounced amazingly high before it hit again and then bounced one last time before it came to rest. Think it just MIGHT be broken, Tony? Duh..

Well, I planned to have it shut off during the meeting.. maybe we'll be OK.

This phone has been giving me trouble anyway. It often doesn't want to charge. It's old. Its time has come, but I just have had trouble deciding on a replacement. The iPhone is nice, so is the Android.. but both are pricey.. I dunno.. there are so many darn cell phones to choose from!

I arrived eight minutes early for the meeting. To my surprise, no one else was there and the receptionist said she thought it was set for 10:00. I checked my paperwork - no, there it was plain as day: 9:00 AM CST.

CST? Oh, crap. I never noticed that. Good thing they had free Green Mountain Rain Forest Nut coffee while I waited..

The meeting went fine except that the wireless internet connection didn't work so I couldn't get emails during it. I left the phone off as planned. We finished up about noon and I started back to South Station. Again, I walked because I felt it would be warmer by now.

It was not. My phone said I had eighteen unheard messages. Oh boy, it's going to be one of those days. I stepped up the pace and started listening to them. My phone started doing that low battery warning beep almost immediately. I hurried through the messages and felt deep panic setting in.

First, I had two crashed servers to deal with. Both of these were machines I had resuscitated from similar crashes in recent weeks. What the hell did I miss? Why were these servers crashing again? And then there was another customer asking the same question I had answered in email just a few days ago.. didn't he read his email? The rest of the messages were less stressful but having so many calls to return with a dangerously low battery upset me. I walked more quickly with my aching, aching fingers and face.

I just missed the train I wanted so now had plenty of time to kill. The wireless at South Station was nearly unusable; I managed to answer a few emails and decided to try calling the most urgent customers. I got their voice mail and left messages expressing my apologies that they had crashed again and promising to be on-site ASAP. The phone beeped ominously.

My train came and soon enough I was home.. well, no.. I had to go to my daughter's house because my wife had left a message that she'd rather pick me up there as she was close by. So I went there. I have a key, and as it happened my daughter called and said that she was coming home early. Great..

So I let myself in and plugged my computer in to recharge. It had gone nearly dead at South Station. I turned on the phone again long enough to get the numbers I'd need and started calling them with my daughter's house phone. That reminds me; I had better tell her the numbers I called or she'll be fighting with Verizon next month..

I called the first crashed customer and this time I reached her. She sounded confused. "It can't be crashed.. I'm using it!", she insisted. My brain spun and I realized that my cell phone had given me deleted messages. Maybe I even fat fingered it with my near frozen digits and asked for deleted messages! Oh boy.. I called the other customers and unconfused them, then set to work trying to figure out who I really needed to call and who I didn't. It turned out that I really had only two new messages.

I suddenly had a moment of dread. I knew my daughter was on her way home and she knew I was there. But her husband's sister also lives there. What if she came home early? No car in the driveway, she wouldn't expect anyone to be inside. She knows me, but maybe not well enough to recognize me instantly under those circumstances. I decided I'd wait outside until my daughter came.. more cold face and head.. but better than possibly scaring someone half to death

Well, no more problems. My daughter showed up, her sister-in-law did not, my wife came a few minutes later. We drove home. The very first thing I did after plugging in my phone to charge was to go to the AT&T web page and order a new cell phone. No research, no double checking, I just clicked on one they offered for free. I'll be getting a LG CU515 in the mail sometime soon.. hope it's a decent phone..

Unix Virus Software

This link may be gone if you are reading this after January 2009: BitDefender Beta Page. There are (or were) two beta products there: "BitDefender Antivirus Scanner for Unices" and "Bitdefender for Mac 2009 - Beta Product Concept Campaign". The first if for Linux and BSD, the second obviously for Mac.

This little blurb was part of release news for Mac:

While a virus may not affect your Mac, BitDefender Antivirus will detect it if downloaded from the internet or received by e-mail, instant messaging or by any other means. Therefore, you will be aware of it and not send it to a PC that could be infected by it.

No such message was in the Linux/BSD notes. Is this because they think Mac users are more apt to insist they have no need for an A/V product? Or because they think they need to explain more to Mac users? Or is it that they think this would be the only use of their product under current conditions?

Well, the last is pretty much the case. Mac users aren't currently threatened by much of anything. I think we all know that's not likely to remain true: while we may never face the disgusting mess that XP faces, Mac attacks certainly will increase as Mac popularity increases.

It is interesting that BitDefender would even bother introducing such a product now. Certainly they have to be incurring significant development costs and it's hard to imagine recouping them: I don't think Mac or Linux users are going to buy A/V products just now (though that may not be true in corporate environments).

Of course we don't want to pass on problems to our less enlightened friends and co-workers, so running an A/V product could be seen as just good citizenship. It was in that spirit that I installed the BitDefender Beta on my Mac.

Remember, this is early beta. Nothing I say here should be taken as slander or complaint. I looked at this in mid November; if it's much after that probably none of this is of value, so keep that in mind.

The main console for this is an attractive command center that gives access to the main functions.

The "Shield" is real-time protection. For example, if I try to copy an Eicar test file, I get stopped by this. The Scanner of course runs through your system as you would expect or can select specific directories to scan.

At the present time there is no way to exclude directories or files from protection; they say that will be added later. The Shield puts a significant load on a Mac: Firefox takes forever to load with this running. They are aware of that, too.

But there's the rub, isn't it? I'm sure they'll improve this, but any such product will impact performance. You can get help from file system notifiers, but there will always be a performance loss.

I honestly don't know if I would run this. It would have to be extremely un-demanding - it's just not worth any annoyance considering how unlikely any threat is right now. I suppose that if it were truly unobtrusive and very cheap I MIGHT use it. But that's pretty hard to imagine. Things can change, though. The threats may increase, we may need products like this.

But not now, right?

Resource Scheduling and Deletion Management in Kerio

Resource scheduling is new to Kerio Mailserver as of version 6.6. It is fully integrated with the Calendar system and therefore is available in Webmail as well as the Outlook Connector. The same Free/Busy scheduler is used as ordinary calendar events. In fact, the resource is simply a special type of attendee.

Resources are created within the Kerio Administration Console under Domain Settings, Resources. A Resource can be a Room or a piece of Equipment. Within those screens you can specify users who are allowed to schedule the resource and a special "Resource Manager" who can access resource calendars and change them to resolve collisions and decide on priorities.

Once the resources are created, they can be accessed when creating calendar events. Conflicts will show up as you would expect; here I am trying to schedule use of a slide projector at a time when it is already in use:

The invitation to "tony" also shows him as "busy". User "foo" is available, fortunately..

This is obviously very simple to use. You can read full details at the Kerio Online Manuals.

Unrelated to this, but also new in 6.6 is a feature I've wanted for some time: automatic deletion of Junk and/or Deleted Items. This can be set system wide with individual user overrides and exceptions.

I am a Kerio reseller. Please see our main Kerio page for more information, pricing or to arrange a demo.

Sharing Kerio Folders, Calendars and Contacts

Kerio "folders" consist of mail folders, calendars, contacts and notes. Every user has their own private folders (but can share any of them with other users) and there are also Public Folders which are automatically available to all users.

Contacts, Calendar events and so on can be added to public folders by the Administrator. That's the Admin account created at installation, not administrator accounts added later. The primary administrator can give access rights to other users if desired.

Users see Public folders automatically, but need to specifically "subscribe" to other folders that may be available to them. For example, suppose I create a new Contact list in my main folder. I right-click on that and choose "Access Rights". I can then choose whether I want to share that with specific users/groups or all users (or users from a specific domain). That folder won't show up in Public Folders no matter how it is shared.. A user who wants to subscribe to that has to know that I am sharing it. They would right-click on their top level folder or choose "Subscribe Shared Folders" in the WebMail Settings to initiate the shared folder subscription dialog. The contact list will then show up and can be searched when composing mail. Names will be completed automatically in Webmail if that option is set in Settings. The user should also select which contact folders to search automatically.

At the file system level, all of these are simply text files. For example, on a Mac OS X system, you'll find the Public folders at /usr/local/kerio/mailserver/store/mail/localhost/#public. Let's say that we wanted to add a contact directly at the file system level (by an external program, for example).

Contacts are simply .eml files stored in the Contacts/#msgs directory:

# ls -l ?msgs
total 32
-rw-------  1 root  apl  265 Apr  7  2008 00000001.eml
-rw-------  1 root  apl  310 Nov 15 11:16 00000002.eml
-rw-------  1 root  apl  310 Nov 15 13:24 00000003.eml
-rw-------  1 root  apl  300 Nov 15 13:30 00000004.eml

A sparsely filled out contact might look like this:

Subject: ralph
Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2008 11:16:12 -0500
Content-Type: text/vcard; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:3.0
PRODID:-//kerio.com/Contacts//NONSGML v1.0//EN
N:;ralph;;;
FN:ralph
X-FILE-AS:ralph
CLASS:PUBLIC
EMAIL;TYPE=PREF,HOME:ralphie@gop.com
END:VCARD

You can create 00000005.eml with the new contact. All that remains is to rename "index.fld" in /usr/local/kerio/mailserver/store/mail/localhost/#public/Contacts to "index.bad"

I would recommend stopping the mailserver, adding the contact, renaming the file and restarting. However, if you can be sure that no one is currently working in this directory, you can do it with the server running.

This method could be used to programatically add a large number of contacts from mailing lists, etc. All Kerio files are text based, so similar methods can be used for Calendar events and so on.

I am a Kerio reseller. Please see our main Kerio page for more information, pricing or to arrange a demo.

E-Junkie Review

While I was researching pricing and all that for my Psst - wanna work for yourself? e-book, I kept coming across E-Junkie links.

You might not notice these if you aren't paying close attention. These things almost always redirect you to the splash page where the actual item is being sold, so you wouldn't necessarily know that E-Junkie is involved unless you looked at the properties of the link. I do that; and I kept seeing "e-junkie.com".

E-Junkie's main page tells the story: "We help you sell online". That's what they do, and they do it well. I've used some other selling methods in the past; E-Junkie seems to have fixed everything I didn't like about those.

You can use E-Junkie to sell your own products or get affilate payments for other people's. If you are selling your own thing like an e-book or a video, you just upload your file or files, set the price and the payment methods (PayPal, Google Checkout, etc.) and that's pretty much it. They give you the code for your website and when a buyer clicks it and makes a payment, they get an instant download link and the money goes immediately to your PayPal or Google Checkout etc. account. No waiting for your money, no having to process the order manually. They have all the extra stuff you might need: discount codes, inventory managment.. options for size, color, all that..

If you just want to sell other people's stuff, you get the code for your site and put it up. For example, if you wanted to resell my book, you'd sign up here, put the code on your website, and wait for me to send you money.

There are problems with that, but it's not E-Junkie, it's the people selling the stuff. First, as I said, you have to wait to get paid. More important is that the sellers are apt to screw you up by changing things on their website. Let's say you find this great little e-book that you really like and you want to recommend it to your readers. You get the code from E-Junkie, and put it on your website. When your readers click on that, they get taken to the other site's selling page. If they actually buy, you get credited with the sale. That's ok, right?

Yeah, but what often happens is that two months from now that splash page isn't about the e-book you liked. They've changed it to something else, moved the book page somewhere else, and forgot to update E-Junkie. Your readers click on the link for this e-book that you've praised up and down but they get sent to some page selling some other thing entirely - maybe something you absolutely would NOT recommend.

There's not much you can do about that other than watch who you sign up with and check your links regularly. As I said, that's not E-Junkie's fault, it's the other sellers.

How do you know you'll get paid? If it's other people, you really don't. Again, that's not E-Junkie's problem. They don't owe you money; the other affiliate does. If it's YOUR product, you get paid immediately. If other people are promoting that, it's up to you to pay them, but E-Junkie makes that easy too - one click and you pay them all!

If you've got something to sell, consider E-Junkie. It's $5.00 a month, no bandwidth or transaction limit, no extra fees, that's it. Good deal, good results.