Just can't get enough of IT

The SMTP Simulator project has been started due to a specific demand during a customer project. We needed a solution to test native transport of Exchange Server 2013 and third party addons to Exchange in an isolated lab envrionment having no internet access at all.

While it is pretty easy to send test emails using PowerShell, we wanted to create an automated service which is capable of:

• replies to incoming emails
• has configured internal and external SMTP domains
• creates random local email addresses
• sends emails depending on a schedule to simulate user behaviour
  • fixed number of emails per timeframe
  • random number of emails per timeframe
  • send misformed emails
• adds attachments to outgoing emails
  • documents 
  • archives / password protected archives
  • EICAR files
• simple testing of POP3/IMAP4 remote connections 
• runs as a Windows service
• has a nice web interface for simplified administration
  • access to SMTP send/receice logs

The SMTP Simulator can be used with any Message Transfer Agents (MTA), not only with Exchange. Besides testing the MTA itself, we needed to test some of the following third-party solutions:

• Anti-Malware solutions using an Exchange transport agent
• SMTP gateway solutions

Architecure overview

Web client interface

The Visual Studio solution creates a MSI installer file. The MSI package created installs the SMTP Service itself, but not the required web application (see issue #49).

Documentation is provided by the SMTP Simulator Wiki.

Open Source

The code has been published as open source at Github. Feel free to fork the solution and contribute to the code.

Report any issues or feature requests at Github.

To-Do's

The project still has some open ends and needs some love and attention. Open issues are part of the issue tracker at Github.

• https://github.com/Granikos/SMTPSimulator/issues

Main topics are:

• Authenticated login
• Rebuild of the installer to include the main service component and the web client required for management
• Enhance wiki documentation

Links

• SMTP Simulator project at Github: https://github.com/Granikos/SMTPSimulator
• SMTP Simulator Wiki at Github: https://github.com/Granikos/SMTPSimulator/wiki

Problem

When you move your DotNetNuke 7 instance from Windows Server 2012 to a new Windows Server 2012 R2 instance you might end up with a not properly rendered skin. This issue relates to a situation where the releated Telerik Script Manager is not properly loaded.

Querying the affected website with Web Page Test showed in this case that the query for the Telerik.Web.UI.WebResource.axd resource resulted in an 404 http error.

Solution

Searching the web resulted in a variation of proposed solutions to this issue. In this case the solution is as follows.

The Telerik.Web.UI.WebResource.axd handler requires to be added to the system.webServer/handlers section of the web.config.

<handlers>
	<add name="ScriptResource" preCondition="integratedMode" verb="GET,HEAD" path="ScriptResource.axd" type="System.Web.Handlers.ScriptResourceHandler, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" />   
	<add name="Telerik.Web.UI.WebResource" path="Telerik.Web.UI.WebResource.axd" verb="*" type="Telerik.Web.UI.WebResource, Telerik.Web.UI, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=121fae78165ba3d4" /> 
</handlers>

If the system.webServer node does not have a handlers node, just add it.

Links

• Web Page Test
• Telerik
• DotNetNuke
• Deutsche DNN Usergroup

The SQLBackupHelper source code has been transferred from Codeplex to Github.

The SQL Backup Helper is a set of Stored Procedures and User Defined Functions, which helps you to automate the process of creating backup sets, cloning database and creating a history set of database backups when using a SQL Server or SQL Server Express edition.

Read more about the SQLBackupHelper project at TechNet Gallery or access the source code ar Github.

Links

• SQLBackupHelper at TechNet Gallery
• SQLBackupHelper at Github