Slow Relay of emails through Exchange 2010

If you are using a third party application such as Group Mail Pro to send emails in a batch you may find Exchange 2010 will take up to 30 seconds to relay each email. This is caused by a setting on the Receive Connector that is outlined here http://bit.ly/LyivnO

You can change the timeout for the acknowledgement from Exchange 2010 to the sender to 0 to enable near instant relay of your emails from the EMS. In this instance my Receive Connector was called Internal Relay.

How to show when a SQL Server Database was last accessed

If you have SQL Server databases and you are unsure if they are still in use then you can use this query to show you the last access time since the server was rebooted.


select a.name, a.dbid, max(last_user_seek), max(last_user_scan)
from sys.sysdatabases a
left outer join sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats b on a.dbid = b.database_id
group by a.name, a.dbid

Allowing users to change printer settings in Sage 200

How to allow users change the settings in a Sage 200 report so that the users can select different paper trays on the fly. A common problem is that a users need to print page 1 to Letterhead paper and then the other pages to Plain paper, but if they change the paper tray settings they find that the report will become out of line and not print correctly.

Open Sage 200 Report Designer

Open the Report Designer in Sage 200 so that you can edit the report in question.

Report Designer

Select the report you need to allow the changes to when printing

Report Explorer

In the right hand top pane you can select the Report Explorer, highlight the report title.

Properties

Here is the crucial part, the properties. In the Printing section you can see the option Save Print this must be set to false to allow the user to change settings on the fly without it altering the content of the report.

Cisco ASA 5500 returns 220 ***** on SMTP with telnet

If you are trying to publish an SMTP Server behind a Cisco ASA 5500 Series with ASA version 8.3 or above then you will find when you try to test port 25 you get the message

220********************************

and you cannot enter any SMTP commands.  This is because SMTP is being inspected and this causes the issue.

The global inspection policy will show that smtp is not listed for inspection and nor is esmtp so whats the cause?

It is the fixup command, a legacy from PIX days.  If you use this command

no fixup protocol smtp 25

You will then see you can telnet on port 25 SMTP commands function correctly

Cisco ASA, FTP and Illegal Port 500

By default a Cisco ASA version 7.0 and above will not allow Active FTP.  This used to be configured using the 'fixup ftp' commands in PIX but in ASA you now have to configure this in your service policy.

What you need to do is make a class map based on a ACL to match the interesting traffic So make sure that this matches the traffic and the port ftp.

Next create a policy map based on this class map and then in the policy map inspect ftp.

This policy map can then be assigned to the service policy global for the device.

Here is our example.

First is the acl called csc_out which matches all traffic from the inside VLANS to any destination on http and ftp


access-list csc_out extended permit tcp object-group obj-inside-vlan any eq www
access-list csc_out extended permit tcp object-group obj-inside-vlan any eq ftp

Next I have a class map to match our acl


class-map csc_outbound_class
 match access-list csc_out

Then a policy map to match our class map and then inspect ftp


policy-map csc_out_policy
 class csc_outbound_class
  inspect ftp

Then finally we add the policy map to the service policy

service-policy csc_out_policy interface Inside

Now active FTP will work and you will no longer get the illegal port 500 command error.