Archived Docs and Tools

This stuff is all seriously old. But it's here because once in a while I want to look up how I did something 18 years ago, and because cool URIs don't change.

A collection of notes and things I've written, which other people might find of use if they're trying to solve the same problems I did.

Bare Linefeeds Cause "The connection was dropped by the remote host" with Microsoft IIS 6 SMTP Service (Dylan Beattie, July 2005)

This document describes a problem whereby certain e-mail messages were no longer being sent correctly from ASP pages after upgrading a web server from Windows 2000/IIS 5 to Windows 2003 Server and IIS 6. Affected messages would remain in the queue indefinitely, and an EventID 4006 "Message delivery to the host '1.2.3.4' failed while delivering to the remote domain 'example.com' for the following reason: The connection was dropped by the remote host." would be created in the Windows event log. This is due to IIS6 allowing messages to be sent containing bare linefeed characters, which in turn cause certain remote mail servers, most notably qmail, to refuse delivery.

Self-Signing IIS 5 SSL Certificates Using OpenSSL (Dylan Beattie, February 2003)

This document describes a process for self-signing SSL certificate requests generated by Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) using the OpenSSL toolkit, a set of free, open-source cryptography tools available under an Apache-style license. It also covers exporting the certificate authority as a PKCS12 certificate, allowing the self-signing CA to be imported into the root certificate store on Windows client systems.

Secure FTP with RSA Authentication Using OpenSSH v3.4-1 on Windows 2000 (Dylan Beattie, July 2002)

This document outlines how to use the OpenSSH tools under Windows 2000 to create a secure file transfer mechanism which can be automated via shell scripts or batch files.

Using the SpeedTouch ADSL USB Modem as a Routing Interface under Windows 2000 (Dylan Beattie, July 2002)

This describes how to configure the popular Alcatel 'stingray' USB ADSL modem as a routing interface, providing a more robust and flexible alternative to Internet Connection Sharing if you're trying to share a single ADSL connection among a small number of users (eg. home LAN, small office, etc.)

Automatic Form Populator for IE5+ (Dylan Beattie, July 2003)

A Javascript-based utility for automatically filling in forms in Internet Explorer. Useful for testing and debugging online registration forms, etc.