Knowledge Base

Configuring Exim to use Gmail as a Smarthost

Phil — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 23:50:40 +0000

Add a router before or instead of the dnslookup router:

gmail_route: driver = manualroute transport = gmail_relay route_list = * smtp.gmail.com

Add a transport:

gmail_relay: driver = smtp port = 587 hosts_require_auth = $host_address hosts_require_tls = $host_address

Add an authenticator (replacing myaccount@gmail.com and mypassword with your own account details):

gmail_login: driver = plaintext public_name = LOGIN hide client_send = : myaccount@gmail.com : mypassword

$host_address is used for hosts_require_auth and hosts_require_tls instead of smtp.gmail.com to avoid occasional 530 5.5.1 Authentication Required errors. These are caused by the changing IP addresses in DNS queries for smtp.gmail.com. $host_address will expand to the particular IP address that was resolved by the gmail_route router.

Truncating SQL Server Log Files

Phil — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 09:33:29 +0000

SQL Server logs in a circular fashion to its transaction log files. To shrink a transaction log file it is first necessary to backup the log.

The following script backs the log up, throwing away the backup in the process and then shrinks the files in the database. Make sure you have a full backup of the database before running.

declare @db varchar(50) set @db = DB_NAME()

backup log @db with truncate_only dbcc shrinkdatabase (@db, truncateonly)

Converting Active Directory Date Time Attributes

Phil — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 09:22:28 +0000

To convert a date time attribute in Active Directory (e.g. as used by lastLogon) to a human readable date time, you can use the w32tm command.

For example with the following LDAP record:

dn: CN=John Smith,CN=Users,DC=DC=example,DC=com lastLogon: 128326919184182832

Running

w32tm /ntte 128326919184182832

Will give the output

148526 12:38:38.4182832 - 27/08/2007 13:38:38 (local time)

See Microsoft Knowledge Base article 555936 for more information.