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PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 14): 550 Email blocked by ORDB

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 4/4/2008
in Technology
. 3 Comments

My incoming email was unusually quiet yesterday morning. Great, I thought, I’ll get some work done!

However, later in the morning I realised that anyone tryint to send me email was receiving the following error:

PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 14): 550 Email blocked by ORDB - to unblock see http://www.example.com/

A quick chat with a few people, including Ross of Rozmic (providers of EmailCLoud - my upstream anti-spam solution) and some Googling told me that my mailserver was mis-configured.

ORDB were one of a number of free blacklists of email spammers. Mailservers could query incoming email against their blacklist and accept or reject email based on the response. However ORDB shut down in 2006.

My mailserver was setup in 2007 but still had a configuration whereby it checked all incoming mail against ORDB (or tried).

Recently, it seems, the blacklist servers were reconfigured to list every ip address as spammers. This was probably to get mailserver admins to once and for-all remove references to ORDB from their config!

When I realised this was where the problem was I went to my mailserver configuration file (Exim.conf), found the following lines:

# deny using ordb
  deny message = Email blocked by ORDB - to unblock see http://www.example.com/
       # only for domains that do want to be tested against RBLs
       domains = +use_rbl_domains
       dnslists = relays.ordb.org

and deleted them.

Sure enough the mail started flowing once more. If you tried to email me in the last couple of days and couldn’t get through, apologies - please do try again.

Enterprise wikis reviewed

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 1/4/2008
in review and wiki
. 28 Comments

Long story short, PBWiki is yer only man.

Why?
I was chair of the it@cork Conference organising committee last year. The committee is made up of volunteers who are all busy with their day-to-day jobs so getting times to meet which suit everyone is always challenging.

To help with the organisation I rolled out a private wiki where we posted meeting minutes, kept track of action items, posted to-do lists and updates on (potential) speaker status’. The wiki was a hosted PBWiki and it was a great success.

It was then decided to rollout a wiki to facilitate the organisation and running of all it@cork committees and subcommittees. The wiki software needed to be able to:

  • handle multiple wikis (one per committee/subcommittee)
  • handle user and group permissions
  • give stats around wiki usage and
  • be cheap or free (it@cork is a not-for-profit)!

I searched around and discovered that Atlassian’s Confluence enterprise wiki product has a free community license specifically for not-for-profits. PBWiki, and SocialText didn’t have any mention of a free Enterprise class offering on their sites so I didn’t really pursue them.

Boy was that a mistake! The setup of the Confluence wiki was far from straightforward. It took two of us the best part of a day to simply install it. Remember that as I was doing this for it@cork, this was not billable time. I was installing it on my own server and because Confluence requires TomCat as its webserver it had to run on a separate port to Apache. This meant several people couldn’t view it in their organisations.

Worse though was that once it was successfully installed, it was a disaster. Uptake and use of the wiki was minimal because the UI was appalling.
A couple of quick examples:
- a simple task which requires many steps, adding (or removing) users to/from groups goes like this:

  • Go to Administration
  • Scroll to bottom of page and click on Manage Users (why not dynamically have the most used menus at the top or failing that use general stats to move most used features to the top, or have two (or more) columns of options so no scrolling is required)
  • Click Show All Users (why? why aren’t they all listed by default?)
  • Click on the user
  • Click on Edit Groups
  • Select Groups and click Join (or Leave) - there is no feedback to tell an admin that this action has been saved

Editing groups doesn’t appear to be possible at all i.e if I want to remove 7 people from a group containing 25 people, I have to go into each user profile (using all the steps above) and remove them individually. It should be possible to do it in one simple step from within a Group Admin page.

Confluence backend

Other problems with Confluence included the fact that there are almost no stats around use of the wiki available and there is a bug in the users and groups which meant that the permissions applied to the groups were not percolating down to the members of those groups. A pretty serious bug I’m sure you will agree.

I Twittered recently that I was looking to get off Confluence and onto another Enterprise wiki platform and within minutes Ross Mayfield, Chairman of SocialText had contacted me (despite being on vacation!) offering me a SocialText wiki for it@cork. Yes please I said (poor guy, I nearly bit his hand off!).

The backend of SocialText is far cleaner, simpler and more intuitive than Confluence.
SocialText wiki backend

However, for completeness sake I also contacted PBWiki and when they heard this was for it@cork, they immediately offered business edition wikis at no cost. This was spectacular news as it@cork were already familiar and happy with PBWiki.

The PBWiki backend is the cleanest and simplest of the three (it is also the only one which fits vertically on a 1024×768 screen).
PBWiki backend

Not only that but when you compare the edit screens of both SocialText and PBWiki, PBWiki definitely comes out ahead in usability.

So we have a winner - PBWiki.

What surprised me in this is that when I Twittered looking for an alternative to Confluence, not one person suggested PBWiki. I have no idea why this is. PBWiki has both Enterprise class functionality and a UI which is completely non-intimidatory. I predict no issues with uptake by users this time round.

By the way, I did also try out DekiWiki and Twiki but I ruled them out quite early on.

UPDATE: Zoli Erdos posted a response to this post where he highlighted a couple of points I didn’t make clearly enough here:
1. I compared a non-hosted version of Confluence to hosted apps like PBWiki and SocialText. However, hosted Confluence is NOT available under the community license. As this was for a not-for-profit a community license was all we could go for. PBWiki and SocialText had no such restrictions.
2. I tried out DekiWiki but the lack of an ability to create Groups ruled it out quickly.

Audio player plugin not working in WordPress 2.5?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 31/3/2008
in Podcasting
. 13 Comments

I use the Audio Player plugin on a number of sites where I publish podcasts, principally PodLeaders.com

The main reason I use it is to simply populate the posts with a Flash player for any podcasts which I post so people can listen to them onscreen.

However, since upgrading PodLeaders to WordPress to 2.5 the plugin has stopped working :-( It simply displays a blank where the Flash player should be.

I tried switching to the Default WordPress theme to see if the problem was theme related but it appears not to be as the problem also happened in that theme.

I downloaded another plugin, called Podcasting which is supposed to work with WordPress 2.5 but that didn’t seem to work either.

Does anyone have any idea where the problem might lie and what I’ll need to do to fix it?

UPDATE: Problem solved. Pete reminded me in the comments of this post to check my folder structure for the Audio Player plugin and sure enough when updating from 1.2.2 to 1.2.3 I had inadvertently uploaded the plugin folder instead of simply the contents of the plugin folder! Fixed now and working once more. Thanks Pete.

Fatal error: Call to undefined function wp_register_sidebar_widget() in…

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 31/3/2008
in WordPress
. 39 Comments

Beware if you update to WordPress 2.5 and are using the very popular K2 theme.

If you are using K2 and you do update to 2.5, you will receive the following error on trying to browse to your WordPress dashboard:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function wp_register_sidebar_widget() in /path-to-blog/wp-admin/includes/dashboard.php on line 31

A bit of research told me that this is because K2 turns off WordPress widgets in favour of its own widget manager and as 2.5 has started to widgetize the Dashboard, you get this error.

To fix the error:
navigate to your K2 folder -> app -> includes
edit the file widgets-removal.php as below

Change the contents of the file from:

< ?php
if (get_option('k2sidebarmanager') == '1') {
	remove_action('plugins_loaded', 'wp_maybe_load_widgets', 0);
}
?>

to

< ?php
if (get_option('k2sidebarmanager') == '1') {
	remove_action('plugins_loaded', 'wp_maybe_load_widgets', 0);
  if( is_admin() )
	{global $pagenow; if( $pagenow == 'index.php' ) wp_maybe_load_widgets();
}
}
?>

Your dashboard should now be browsable once more!

I knew I should have held off on updating longer. I blame Donncha!

Live Maps Bird’s Eye now includes (some) Irish towns

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 27/3/2008
in Microsoft and maps
. 3 Comments

Via Clare Dillon the Virtual Earth blog and Martha Rotter on Twitter I spotted that Microsoft’s Live Maps now includes images of Cork, Galway, Carlow, Limerick, Navan & Wexford - cool!

The Bird’s Eye button becomes active when you are over an area that Microsoft has detailed aerial imagery of.

The image below is of Cork City Hall. You can rotate and zoom to see it from other angles and sizes! Way cool.

Live Maps Bird's Eye view of Cork City Hall

According to Clare’s blog post, Dublin will be up soon as well.

Get off your high horse Ed!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 25/3/2008
in Browsers, Microsoft and apple
. 24 Comments

There was a big bruhaha on the intertubes over the weekend when Apple ran its software update on Windows and offered the Safari 3.1 browser download as the default selected option.

Now I am not for a second condoning this kind of behaviour. I believe opt-in is the only way to do optional updates, especially when you are adding applications to a users machine.

However, I had to laugh when I saw Ed Bott get all up on his high horse about this. Ed is a Microsoft guy so it was all the more hilarious that he try to grab the moral highground here. In his post he said:

I think Apple is dead wrong in the way it’s gone about using its iPod monopoly to expand its share in another market. Ironically, an excellent model for how this update program should work already exists. It’s called Windows Update, and it embodies all the principles that Apple should follow… The right way to do it involves these four principles

* Opt-in is the only way. The update process should be completely opt-in. The option to deliver software should never be preselected for the user.
* Offer full disclosure. The software company has a responsibility to fully disclose what its software does, and the customer should make the opt-in decision only after being given complete details about how the update process works.
* Offer updates only. Updates should be just that. They should apply only to software that the customer has already chosen to install.
* Don’t mix updates. Updates that are not critical should be delivered through a separate mechanism.

They are good principles, I have no argument with them however Ed offers these principles up as if Microsoft lived by them! Ed, you are dreaming. Microsoft are just as guilty of breaching these principles as Apple. I don’t use Microsoft software much but the last time I tried to update Windows Live Writer my default search engine was changed to Live Search, and I had to opt out or I would have had Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Live OneCare installed on my laptop.

Pot kettle black Ed.

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