Kent J. Chen's WebLog

a personal journal by an addictive geek

Email Open Relay Testing

Posted in Uncategorized on December 29th, 2004 by Kent

It is so important that to make sure your mail server is not open relayed.? Otherwise, after a while your mail server is opening your mail server’s IP address will be registed on at least one of the blacklist and you will start getting email problems.? In order to prevent this happening, testing on a regular basis is quite important to a system administrator.? Here is a simply procedure to test if the relay on your mail server is opened.



  1. In Dos-prompt window, type telnet domain-name.com 25 to open a SMTP session.
  2. helo
    250 Hello domain-name.com
  3. mail from:

GUI version of PortQry Tool

Posted in Uncategorized on December 29th, 2004 by Kent

Microsoft provides a graphical UI for the Portqry tool–Portqryui–which you can download at Microsoft download site. Portqryui provides command sets for ports to query for, including


  • Domains and Trusts
  • IP Security (IPSec)
  • Networking
  • SQL Server service
  • Web service
  • Exchange Server
  • NetMeeting
  • miscellaneous

Like Portqry, Portqryui can be configured to run against the local box (IP address 127.0.0.1, the standard loopback address) or a remote IP address or Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN). When you view the output of the Portqryui tool, you’ll see the actual commands that…

Open Source Award 2004

Posted in Uncategorized on December 28th, 2004 by Kent

And now, the open source software community has the Open Source Awards.


Quote from http://builder.com.com/5100-6375_14-5136758.html?tag=nl.e601




Read more about the winners of the 2004 Open Source Awards:




Julian Seward for Valgrind
Sooner or later, in the life of every developer, you’ll have to turn to a debugger. There’s only so much you can do with embedded println statements. For the Linux-on-Intel-x86 crowd, one of the most popular

Other browser “not up top par” with IE

Posted in Uncategorized on December 27th, 2004 by Kent

Referencing the FireFox thread that was going on earlier, here is another different story http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/378632 that concludes as:



It appears that the overall quality of code, and more importantly, the amount of QA, on various browsers touted as “secure”, is not up to par? with MSIE; the type of a test I performed requires no human interaction and involves nearly no effort. Only MSIE appears to be able to consistently handle [*] malformed input well, suggesting this is the only program that underwent rudimentary security QA testing with a similar fuzz utility.


This is of course

CIS Benchmarks/Security Tools

Posted in Uncategorized on December 25th, 2004 by Kent

Is there any cost effectively scan and analyze security tools out there? Nessus is one way to go for sure, but others are available including this, the CIS (Center for Internet Security) Benchmarks/Security tools at http://www.cisecurity.org/.

JavaScript Object Browser Sample

Posted in Uncategorized on December 25th, 2004 by Kent

Mark Wagner posted a useful script sample on his blog.  The script allows you to browse through various objects on the DOM as well as JavaScript variables.  I happened many times having the trouble to find those kind of information every time when I need them. So I think it is really a good one to have it in hand to save your valuable time.


See the full article here: http://blogs.crsw.com/mark/articles/652.aspx.  And the sample starts below:

How to run a report that displays the last password change for all accounts in a container

Posted in Uncategorized on December 24th, 2004 by Kent

By John Savill
WindowsITPro InstantDoc #44862


‘ John Savill
‘ This is based on Richard Mueller’s script on Interger8Date
‘ conversion, which is copyrighted as below.
‘ Copyright (c) 2003 Richard L. Mueller
‘ Hilltop Lab Web site – http://www.rlmueller.net

‘ I simply changed it to output all objects in a passed DN.

Option Explicit

Dim strLdapPath, objConnection, objChild
Dim lngTZBias, objUser, objPwdLastSet
Dim objShell, lngBiasKey, k

‘ Check that all required arguments have been passed
If Wscript.Arguments.Count < 1 Then
Wscript.Echo “Arguments required.

How to export the data to xml format from the Excel file

Posted in Uncategorized on December 24th, 2004 by Kent

Processing XML file is way easier than CSV or other format of file, so it is good to know how to export the data to XML format from the Excel file.


1. Create a xml map file which acutally is a simply xml file containing at least 2 sets of the data.  See the example below:


<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”ISO-8859-1″ ?>
<data>
         <users>
                  <id>id</id>
                  <fullname>full name</fullname>
         </users>
         <users>
                  <id>id</id>
                  <fullname>full name</fullname>
         </users>
</data>



2. From Excel, click Data->XML->XML Source… to open the XML Source window on the right side of work sheet.


3. Click XML Maps button and Add button to add the XML…

OldCmp helps you to clean up your user accounts as well as computer accounts

Posted in Uncategorized on December 23rd, 2004 by Kent

The link to the web site where you can find out more about oldcmp is http://www.joeware.net/win/free/tools/oldcmp.htm.


Haven’t fully tested yet so don’t have much to comment but thought it is something good to know.

Things Google knows about you

Posted in Uncategorized on December 22nd, 2004 by Kent


Quote from http://hublog.hubmed.org/archives/000942.html




  • Everything you search for using Google
  • Every web page you visit that has Google Adsense ads on it
  • Which country you’re in
  • Every Blogger page you visit, and the referring page

  • If you have an Adsense account

    • Your full name, address and bank account details
    • The IP address of everyone who visits your pages with Adsense ads on them
    • The number of visitors to each of your pages with Adsense ads on them

  • If you use a GMail account

    • Who you send