Fakemail for Developers

6 Jun, 2008  No Comment

The other day when I was setting up email notifications for a Zend Framework application, I stumbled across Fakemail.

From the developers website:

fakemail is a fake mail server that captures emails as files for acceptance testing. This avoids the excessive configuration of setting up a real mail server and trying to extract mail queue content.

I am quite impressed with this handy little script (written in both Python and Perl), as it works exactly as advertised: taking out the time required to properly configure a SMTP server and saving the hassle of having dozens of test messages showered across inboxes. Instead of forwarding emails on to their recipients, it simply saves a raw copy of the email to the specified directory.

The script has a windows installer that bundles the script with python and will run on all flavors of Linux and Unix assuming that they have perl or python installed.

To configure Zend_Mail use fakemail place the following in your bootstrapper or common config file:

PLAIN TEXT
PHP:
  1. Zend_Mail::setDefaultTransport(new Zend_Mail_Transport_Smtp('localhost',array(
  2. 'port' => 10025
  3. )));

The 'localhost' variable is the address of the computer that fakemail is running on (likely the local machine). The port number is the port that is specified when fakemail is run on the command line.

For more information about fakemail, binaries, and a usage guide. Visit the developers website at Sourceforce: http://www.lastcraft.com/fakemail.php

Gentoo blacklist.py init Script

3 Jun, 2008  No Comment

I have several servers which run an assortment of http, svn, ssh, and ftp services. One of the largest annoyances are automated breaking scripts pounding my services. Recently, I have been looking into blacklist.py: a handy python script written by Reto Glauser, which monitors syslog-ng logs looking for possible break-in attempts. The script uses iptables to block future traffic from suspicious IP's for a specified amount of time.

After I got the script setup and running I wanted a Gentoo init script that would automatically start the script on boot. After reading through some examples in my /etc/init.d/ directory I seem to have managed to cook up something that works: Read the rest of this entry »