In our semi-regular search of the web for references to print-bingo.com, we found this short video by MrFloresFilm on YouTube of an educational use of our bingo card generator. It’s always fun to see where our bingo cards show up.
We stumbled on a user generated video about print-bingo.com
March 3rd, 2012Do not use xinetd to create an obscure port for SMTP
February 27th, 2012Years ago I created a simple xinetd rule to use a custom port for SMTP.
I set this up years ago when my local ISP started to block outbound SMTP connections on port 25 as an anti-spam measure. I had been using our web server for SMTP relay for several years before this because this same ISP had quite poor uptime in the past. When my ISP blocked port 25, my email stopped going out. I could either switch to the ISPs mail servers, or find another way to get my mail to our web server.
I can’t recall the exact reasoning, IIRC, the ISP also required that you use an email address from their domain in either the from or reply-to lines. Whatever the reasons, I created a custom port to route email through our server to continue to bypass our ISP’s email system altogether.
I chose an unused, non-standard, low TCP port and set up the redirect in xinetd. Sendmail, our SMTP server, was previously configured to relay for specific IP addresses, I didn’t change that.
That was at least 5 years ago. It was a simpler time and spammers stuck to searching on default ports for open email relays.
Well, today I can confirm that spammers will do a port scan to find open email relays – surely there are better ways to make money that come up with crazy ways to send a bit of spam?
I learned that I had created an open relay on a non-standard port by accident. When an inbound connection is relayed by xinetd to a different port number (at least the way I did it) the service has no idea what is the real remote IP address. Sendmail thought it was relaying for email from localhost! Argh.
Unfortunately, for a few hours today our web server was relaying spam for some Brazil IP address and advertising something or other in Portuguese. The old relay rule was turned off as soon as I traced the hole.
New MySQL Escape Tool on tools.perceptus.ca
February 19th, 2012I had the need to escape a fairly large string for running a one-off SQL query against a database today. There were plenty of quotation marks and other dangerous characters in the text… so, I needed to escape the string properly.
Thus, the newest tool on Perceptus’ Web Tools, our new Web Based MySQL Escape Tool.
We hope that someone besides us finds a use for it.
Oh, and for our American friends, Happy President’s Day!
T4 Summary Filed! Earlier than ever before.
January 20th, 2012Perceptus is ahead of the game this year, and we’ve filed our T4 and T4 Summary for 2011 in January of 2012.
We don’t have many employees, so we use the CRA’s web forms. I have to admit, the CRA T4 Web Forms get better every year. A couple years ago, the web generated T4’s looked… odd. They were very different from the traditional T4 layout, so we didn’t use those. Last year, that was fixed. This year, there are some nice little improvements here and there.
For some reason, you have to fill in box 26 this year, Box 26, “CPP/QPP Pensionable Earnings”. In our case, we just have to enter the same value from Box 14, “Employment Income”.
Anyway, this is a reminder to other Canadian micro-businesses. It’s time to do the T4’s.
Oh, and happy Chinese New Year.