Category Archives: ORF

ORF-related posts.

ORF 5.2 Beta: What’s in it for me? (Part 3)

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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.

  1. Part 1: The Attachment Quarantine
  2. Part 2: Log Event Explanations from Email Notifications
  3. Part 3: Configuration Snapshots (this article)

Configuration Snapshots

One amazing thing I’ve learned as a parent is that two-years olds have this truly endless curiosity. They thrive on exploring things and learn a lot this way. Are Daddy’s ears detachable? What happens if I evenly distribute LEGO bricks on the floor? Muffled screams noted (Subjects occasionally engage in one-legged tribal dance. Repeat testing until statistical significance is determined.).

Anyway, despite having better means of learning, adults still love the same trial-and-error method of exploration. When was the last time you started with the manual when you unboxed your new gadget? That’s right, never, and I’m with you. Whenever I get my hands on new software, I get a clicking frenzy and pretty soon I head to the Settings menu to see what can I mess up. Sometimes I change things to the better. Sometimes I end up frantically searching for the “OMG RESTORE THE DEFAULTS RIGHT NOW BEFORE THE REACTOR MELTS DOWN” button, because the results look just one explosion short of a Michael Bay movie.

So if you’re feeling adventurous, I have great news for you: ORF 5.2 will have your back. One of the goodies you receive with the new version is called Configuration Snapshots and you’re going to love it, because now you can revert to a previous configuration state when your experiment runs just a tiny bit off the trail (as in, Michael Bay. Explosions). Every time you save your configuration, ORF automatically creates a snapshot of the previous configuration state and keeps a long history of snapshots for you, which comes super-handy when you did not quite plan ahead, but you know things started going downhill two days ago.

For carefully planned experiments, you can also establish baselines by marking an earlier automatically created snapshot as “baseline”. Unlike automatically created snapshots, these are kept indefinitely and you can give them meaningful names and add comments to remind your future self or fellow ORF administrator why they were created at the first place. If LEGO bricks turn out to be a less-than-spectacular idea, just make them magically reappear in the box by reverting to the “Last known good LEGO box configuration”, without launching Operation Collect a Hundred Bricks in With a Satisfyingly Ashamed Look on My Face.

Ready to make some changes to ORF? Start with our Best Practices Guide and get the most out of your ORF.

ORF 5.2 Beta: What’s in it for me? (Part 2)

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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.

  1. Part 1: The Attachment Quarantine
  2. Part 2: Log Event Explanations from Email Notifications (this article)
  3. 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.

Subscribe to our blog to get notified when in the next article we talk about the new Configuration Snapshots feature.

 

ORF 5.2 Beta: What’s in it for me? (Part 1)

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Now that the beta of ORF 5.2 is just around the corner, 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.

  1. Part 1: The Attachment Quarantine (this article)
  2. Part 2: Log Event Explanations from Email Notifications
  3. Part 3: Configuration Snapshots 

What is the Attachment Quarantine?

One of the useful new features arriving with 5.2 is the Attachment Quarantine. The concept is simple enough: whenever an email attachment is blacklisted by the Attachment Blacklist of ORF, the original attachment is saved in the file system to a dedicated folder for administrator retrieval.

This ability to recover the original attachment can come handy in a number of ways. For example, it enables you to enforce stricter attachment rules. When you implement a policy to allow .ZIP and .DOC attachments only, you still will be able to manually recover that .PSD file the graphic designer sent to marketing 15 minutes before the print submission deadline and right before he went offline to catch his flight to The-person-you-have-called-is-not-available-land. Handy, right?

Quarantining normally happens on a per-attachment basis, i.e. only those attachments will be quarantined that were blacklisted by ORF. However, when the email gets dropped due to an attachment filter hit, all attachments will be quarantined. This enables complete recovery of the email attachments on an accidental blacklisting.

Another thing to know about this feature is that attachments may be quarantined under a different file name than the original one. I particular, a new file is generated when:

  • A file with the same name is already in the quarantine folder (think of “agreement.docx”).
  • The file name would pose a security threat. Nothing stops Dr. Evil from sending an email with an attached file like “\Windows\explorer.exe”, “LPT1” or “file.txt:stream”, so ORF is a bit paranoid about path components, reserved characters and reserved file names.

Due to the above, you should always check the quarantined file name when starting the recovery. This file name can be found in the ORF logs, but you can also add the quarantined file name to attachment replacement notices under Configuration / Blacklists / Attachment Filtering / Settings.

Once turned on, the quarantine can run unattended, thanks to the automatic retention control that deletes files after 30 days by default. And when I say “files”, I mean “any files older than 30 days”, so be sure to use a dedicated directory for the quarantine. While you’re at it, it is probably a good idea to exclude this folder from real-time antivirus scanning as well, because some of those quarantined files will inevitably be viruses. If you’re not into compiling a nice library of viruses, that’s OK as well, just be aware that anti-virus software may remove quarantined files or cause warnings in ORF about files cannot be written in the quarantine.

There’s more to ORF 5.2 than just this feature, stay tuned for our next article in the series.

ANN: ORF 5.1 Released

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The first update to the highly appraised new generation of ORF is here. After thorough and extensive internal and public testing, ORF 5.1 was released publicly today.

ORF 5.1 features numerous improvements and tweaks including but not limited to:

  • Microsoft® Exchange 2013 support
  • IDNA support in the URL harvester engine
  • Reverse DNS lookup in the ORF Log Viewer

If you are interested in learning more about the changes please visit the ORF 5.1 Change Log. When you are ready to deploy the new version, download it from the Client Portal.

If you have any questions about compatibility or using ORF 5.1 in specific setups or infrastructures, please send us an email to cs@vamsoft.com and we will reply as soon as we can.

Would you like to see other features implemented in future releases? Visit the Feature Requests section of our website and either vote on your favorite features or add your own request.