In a previous post I wrote about Outlook, Firefox and “General Failure” messages and a solution to stop these messages from appearing. I’ve just had an update to Firefox and had to go through the same process again because the error messages were coming back. This time it didn’t work though.

A bit of poking around the interweb has given me this little gem though. Basically it has to do with DDE, an old method of allowing applications to communicate with each other. The simplest thing to do is disable it for Firefox:

1. Go to Control Panel -> Folder Options -> File Types.
2. Click on: Extension: {NONE}, filetype: Firefox URL
3. Click on Advanced
4. Click Edit
5. Uncheck the “Use DDE”, and OK twice.
6. Repeat 2-5 for the the following:
   1. “URL: Hypertext Transfer Protocol”
   2. “URL: Hypertext Transfer Protocol with Privacy”

Hopefully this one should fix the problem permenantly

Update There is a new solution at Still getting General Failure messages in Firefox

Original Post

This problem occurs when you click on a link in Outlook and the page opens in Firefox but also creates an error message along the lines of:

General Failure. The URL was:
“http://www.devblog.co.uk”. The system cannot find the file specified.

I think that this problem only occurs in Outlook 2007 but I could be wrong. Anyway, the problem appears on both XP and Vista and in both cases the same registry fix will cure the problem. Usual advice: back up the registry and important data and if it all goes wrong, moan to someone else!

Go to “Start > Run” and Enter “Regedit”. Or in vista I think you can just type “Regedit” in the box at the bottom (I can’t be more specific, I left my Vista laptop at work). When you’ve got regedit open head to the following path:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\FirefoxURL\shell\open\ddeexec

Open the key “Default” which should have the value of “”%1″,,0,0,,,,”. Delete the string of crap and save it then exit Regedit. This will stop the warnings from popping up.

A quick warning though - If you tend to switch the Default Browser between Firefox and IE (for banking reasons or website testing such as myself) then when you switch back to FF the problem will come back and you’ll have to edit the registry again.

Before I start this is not intended to be the usual argument between the Microsoft and Linux camps but more a desription of my findings when I had to evaluate the two products for use within our office as the main server. Our office network is currently of the usual standard you’d find in a small 5-10 person company that doesn’t have an in-house IT person:

• All internet traffic is routed through the ADSL router with no management and for the large part, static IP addresses
• Printers shared on which ever PC they were configured from first
• PCs with no password on the user account
• A random mixture of different versions of Windows and Office

I know this shouldn’t be the case with me being the in-house IT “professional”, but my main job is to develop and maintain several enterprise quality websites. This leaves me with very little time to devote to my additional role as IT Manager and Sys Admin so up until now as long as everyone good do their job on that particular day and as long as none of the office IT equiptment had smoke and flames billowing out of it then I considered that part of my job a success.

Unfortunately the MD has thrown a spanner in the works by setting us all a set of goals that will allow our company to function at it’s best and also to grow over the next year or so. This is normally fine by me as it’s the kind of mission critical memo that I lovingly file away in the “Deleted Items” folder before getting on with some serious Ajax coding. This time is a little different though as he’s made our bonuses dependant on the goals being acheived. There’s a few bits and bobs in here that I’m not going to include here but for the most part they boil down to:

• Reliable uptime of printers, file storage and internet connection for all office PCs
• Backup of all files and email that can be recovered with 1 working hour
• Document collaboration for both onsite and offsite staff

Now my initial reaction was to head off to Dell and spec up a shinny new server running Windows Small Business Server 2003 to take advantage of the combination of Exchange and SharePoint but after taking into account some of the PCs are running old versions of Office (there may even be an odd Works and Outlook Express installation) and a few Windows XP Home, by the time everything was upgraded to XP Pro and Office 2003/2007 plus the server it was a bill upwards of £2000!

For a small business of 6 employess that is a bit steep by anyones standard so I did the obvious and headed off into the Linux world. I’m not a die hard linux fan by any means. I like it a lot - where it’s appropriate, but I don’t use it on my desktop - I’m on XP Pro. Neither will I use windows all the time - I don’t have a single IIS or SQL installation (L.A.M.P all the way!) but Linux is cheaper if you can do it yourself. That’s where businesses of our size have to find the trade off: you don’t want to be paying a consultant or your IT staff more than it would have cost to get a Windows server up and running.

In the end I weighed up the pros and cons and made the following decision: Linux this time based on the following:

• Fedora Core 8 running on a P4 1Gb box
• Leave the email running on our Web Hosts SMTP/POP3 servers
• Configure all the usual DNS, DHCP, Samba, Firewall and routing servers so that they worke just as though we’d forked out £2000 on Windows SBS
• Install OpenOffice and O3Spaces (or similar) on every machine

So thats the plan. The moral of this (as usual) long winded rambling and unnecessary story? Find the solution that fits your needs and budget. Time to implement it and then report back!

I’ve recently had to do a complete reinstall on our 1and1 Root Linux server which is easy enough in itself as it’s just a case of going into the Control Panel and hitting Server Re-Image alogn with your choice of operating system. I went for Fedora Core 6 and within an hour everything was up and running. Within another hour I had my files uploaded (4Gb including images), MySQL databases loaded and my custom httpd.conf loaded. After that I thought the only hard bit would be the extras I had installed but with a quick “yum install ImageMagick” and “yum install webmin” then using Webmin to set up the firewall properly, everything was good to go.

With the sites back up I just needed to do a few quick checks to see if various bits of the website were working. Everything was fine except for PHP sending out emails. I knew that newer versions of Fedora were supposed to use QMail and not Sendmail so I headed off into the system to see if I could track down the problem. After a bit of messing around it seemed the mail server was fine (even with the MTA set as QMail) but nothing would be sent out using PHP. By saving the MTA to Sendmail I could get emails out using the mail() function but not using PEAR’s Mail package. Enabling ErrorReporting on one of my scripts threw up the errors:

Warning: main(Mail.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in
/var/www/html/email.php on line 15

Fatal error: main(): Failed opening required ‘Mail.php’
(include_path=’.:/usr/local/share/php/pear’) in
/var/www/html/email.php on line 15

I then loaded up a phpinfo() script and noticed the following line:

–without-pear

For some reason they’ve decided to be overly cautious and install PHP without PEAR support so even though PEAR was showing as being installed and commands such as “pear install Mime” were working, something with PHP was a bit pear shaped (get it, arf arf!). It turns out that the solution is simply to open up /etc/php.ini and add the following line:

include_path=”.;/usr/share/pear”

Everything seems to be working now, a bit more testing might be in order though

Our main company, Medicology, derives the majority of its business from mailings to NHS staff. We currently use PHPlist to manage the sending of our emails, with the contacts being broken down into one of several lists based on the source of the contact and which day they are contacted on.

This works fine at the moment but we want to be able to have greater control over the mailings and who receives what, when. There are a few things that we’d like to do, some of which are easily done and some of which can’t be done.

Possible with PHPlist

• Add extra contact information such as location, job title and hospital
• Automatically schedule emails for later sending
• Send emails through an external SMTP server requiring authentication
• Rich Text Editor (RTE) built in for creation of good quality emails

These are all essential features for us and handled very well in PHPlist. There are some features that either don’t perform the way we want or are missing and which are also essential for us.

Missing from PHPlist

• Skip sending to contacts if they’ve received an email within a certain time frame
• Dynamically create lists based on selectable criteria (slighty supported in PHPlist but not to the extent we need)
• Modify the content of the emails based on contact preferences or other database stored information

Although I’d like to continue using PHPlist, the business benefits of the missing features are too great to ignore so I think I’m going to have to make a decision and either start modifying our PHPlist installation or create my own mailing programme.

I’m going to have a look through the code for PHPlist, make a decision and then I’ll post back later.

I got an email through today that I was immediately cautious about. Partly because it was sent to an email address that’s been on the internet for years and receives pretty much no legitimate email, only spam, and partly because the message was in German (and actually came from a .as email address which is… American Semoa!).

My first thought was that it was a new virus that I hadn’t come across yet but after checking a few sites for new threats and running the attachment through 2 seperate AV progs, I decided to open it. Turns out it is one of these stock spam emails with all the details in the PDF.

I actually thought this was quite clever as the original message looks like a Fw: and any information that can be used to identify it as spam is enclosed in the PDF. It’ll be interesting to see how much they vary the content and names of the attachments to keep people on their toes.

I’ve been having the usual problems with spammers loading my board with registrations and profile with links to porn and viagra sites. I’ve got account activation enabled but couldn’t find the link to Enable Visual Confirmation.

After a bit of searching I found out that the problem was that I had installed a custom template that didn’t support the option in the Admin > Configuration page to allow me to turn it on. After googling I found this article that allows you to check your template for compatibility with visual confirmation. After making a few mods, everything was good.

The only problem now was that they were still showing up in the memberlist which kind of defeated the purpose. A few more searches and I found this post that shows you how to make the mods needed.

All fixed!

PayPal and therefore eBay are the top targets for spam and phishing emails (with the possible exceptions of the big banks). For those that get these emails claiming to be from PayPal or eBay, never click on the links on them, just go to the website and login from there. Anyway, back to the point.

PayPal is trying to come to an arrangement with some of the major email providers so that any emails that appear to come from PayPal will only make it into peoples inboxes if they are digitally signed by PayPal. So far they haven’t made much headway but it’s still early days but I think PayPal should be applauded for there efforts.

The other big companies out there should take note and join the fight on spam by following PayPal’s lead. If they can eliminate this source of spam then the ISPs and email providers can concentrate on removing the other sources of spam from our inboxes.

Just a thought, bet it never happens

Ask a group of casual internet users what the biggest problem with the modern computing world is today and they most of them will probably say it’s spam or popups (read: spyware). As 80% of all spam apparently comes from botnets, it follows that the majority of our problems come from insecure PCs that have been exploited.

Those in the pro-Microsoft camp will say that Windows is always targetted because it’s the most popular operating system on Earth, which is true. They’ll also say that Microsoft’s new offering will fix all the problems, stop spam, eliminate spyware and repair the ozone. Erm… maybe. The problem as I see it though is not just tightening up security, but educating those home users and small businesses who don’t have experienced IT staff to protect and repair their machines.

It’s fine releasing a new version of Windows that don’t have all user accounts set to Administrator level by default and the major update of XP SP2 which turned on Automatic Updates and put a basic firewall in place, but these changes either don’t go far enough to protect the end-user or in the case of Automatic Updates, still require interaction from the end-user to be effective.

Who know’s the best way to go about it, but in my little bunch of co-workers and friends/family that come to me with problems, telling them what the problem is, what caused it and how to stop it happening again seems to help a lot more than just transparently applying a few patches for them. It seems that Google has similar ideas in the bag as I noticed the other day.

I was Googling “This site may harm your computer.“. It appears that Google are taking action by educting end-usres by informing them of sites that may install malware. I think this is a brilliant first step and Google should be congratulated.

One of the disadvantages of being a Web Developer / Sys Admin is that my email address is published on a lot of our websites. As we have over 4000 domains this means that I end getting quite a lot of spam!

Last week I had a few days off and when I got back on day four to check my email, I had about 3500 emails, most of which had to be spam. Outlook’s spam filter took care of about half and the few rules I’ve set for common, easily identified spam got rid of about a third of the rest. This still left me with over 1000 messages to sort through. Annoying…

After I’d done this I decided to take a two-pronged approach to making sure this didn’t happen again. First, I went to all our major sites and replaced every email address I could find on them with a peice of JavaScript that uses

document.write()

within a function to write the email address after the page loads. This should stop our email addresses from ending up on any more spam lists.

The next step was to take all the catch-all email accounts we have and instead of forwarding them all to my real email addresses, forward them to the best FREE Spam Filter in the world, Gmail. This allows me to run them through Gmail’s spam filter and then forward them on again to my real email account. Genius.

This second change means that I’ve gone from 200 spam messages getting into my Inbox every day to about a dozen. Perfick!