Now that the beta of ORF 5.2 has arrived, we thought you’d appreciate a few words on what the new version covers. In this three-part series, we’ll look into some of the new features.
- Part 1: The Attachment Quarantine
- Part 2: Log Event Explanations from Email Notifications (this article)
- Part 3: Configuration Snapshots
Log Event Explanations from Email Notifications
We do everything to make our log messages self-explanatory, but the log is just not the medium for thorough education on the subject. Twitter posts are full of those URL shortener bit.ly links, because there’s little wisdom besides “lol” you can share in 140 characters.
Recognizing how logs will always fall short of giving you all the information you need, we developed this special knowledge base for ORF 5 that gives you detailed explanations for the most common events in ORF based on the event message. We are periodically expanding the range of articles available using the search logs generated by your event lookups. Also, for every new feature, we add articles for every new log message.
Have you noticed the “Explain” button in the ORF Log Viewer? If you didn’t, we’re with you: it’s not the most emphasized functionality there is. Also, we figure you have better things to do in the morning than starting the ORF Log Viewer, you know, just for the fun of it.*
But then if you don’t use the Log Viewer and prefer to ignore the hundreds of engineering hours we put into it (ahem!), how do you know if something important has happened to ORF? That’s right, you enable administrator email notifications about ORF errors!
In ORF 5.2, we made event explanations available from email notifications by adding an “Find event explanation online…” link to each email. This will bring you to our website where we’ll give you the same event explanation as the one you’d get from the ORF Log Viewer. That’s it, you no longer get denied one of the best features of ORF just because you prefer to ignore the hundreds of engineering hours we put into the Log Viewer.
* Although you may find some fun things there. The SMTP Module around ORF 1.0 had a code branch that was never to be called: the logic allowed for it, but we found no circumstances when this code could be ever executed. Accordingly, we put an error condition there that logged “This error never happens.” It turned out we were not entirely right (ok, maybe outright wrong), but sure there were a few fun moments between our tech support and dev teams.
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