Sending EMail from the Command Line with Ubuntu Server

In a previous post I wrote about the problems I had encountered while trying to configure my Ubuntu Server to send emails from the command line (actually from a script but it amounts to the same thing). I overcame the problem in the short term by using curl to send messages via Twitter but I really wanted to work out how to end emails instead. Well after a bit more research and some testing I have cracked it

What I didn’t understand was that I needed two components to be able to send an email in this way, a Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) and an email client. For my solution I have used Nullmailer as my MTA and Mutt as my Client.

Nullmailer is not a full blown MTA like Postfix but then I didn’t really need something that heavyweight for my purposes. Nullmailer is a ‘minimal mail relay’ – it doesn’t handle local mail delivery or download message from other servers, it just passes email from the local machine to a mail server for delivery.

Mutt is a small but powerful, text-based email client which can send email from the command line but also has a GUI (of sorts). I was only interested in the command line interface for this little project. Read the rest of this entry »

Keeping OpenDNS Updated with Ubuntu Server

In a previous post I explained how I configued my Ubuntu Server to send a tweet whenever my external IP address changed. Well I found that no only did my external IP address change with startling regularity but it was also causing my OpenDNS settings to become out of sync.

Basically in the house we have a single PC and the rest are laptops. Now I have the OpenDNS updater on the PC and this will syncronise my external IP address with OpenDNS when it is turned on – but what if the IP address changes and that PC is not turned on.? Answer, all my parental controls go out of the window!
Now I could install the OpenDNS updater on the laptops but the problem I see there is that if one of them connects to another network, via WiFi for example, then my OpenDNS settings will be updated with the networks external IP address – not what I want!
Read the rest of this entry »

Intellisense not working via COM

I recently needed to write a class in C# that would be accessed by a VB6 application – something quite new to me.

The existing VB6 application (which is in the process of being rewritten in C#) currently uses OLE Automation to generate MSWord documents based on templates. While this approach was working fine it was pretty slow. Having made the decision that the new version of the application would be capable of generating Word 2007 documents it was decided that the resulting class should be accessible to the VB6 application via COM Interop.
Read the rest of this entry »

Upgrading to Windows 7 (Dual Boot with Ubuntu)

I’ve run with Vista for about a year now and on the whole have had no problems with it. Now I’m one of those people that hasn’t really had any problems with Vista – and frankly I’m not sure what all the fuss was about. Yeah, I was happy with XP and only upgraded to Vista because my new employer was using it.

So why was I looking to upgrade to Windows 7 now..? Well there were a number of reasons but the most pressing was that Vista was starting to get on my nerves. So some reason it started to run painfully slow. This was mainly due to the fact that the hard drive would be chattering away for a good 20 minutes after I had logged in – now that’s infuriating! What the hell was it doing.? Well I didn’t really have the drive to spend hours looking for the source so had just lived with it.

When Windows 7 hit Release Candidate I thought – “What the Hell”. If it all went to hell in a wheel barrow then I could either restore my XP system with the CD that came with the laptop or install Vista from the CD I had bought for the upgrade (OEM version purchased with a new HDD).
Read the rest of this entry »