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Text File | 1993-12-15 | 19.1 KB | 365 lines

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ WHATSNEW.DOC │ └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Version 2.13 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 46. If you were using the MHS_DEFAULT_HOST option in XGATE.CFG to tell XGATE to use the name of your workgroup for inbound SMTP messages that don't specify the name of the destination MHS hub, it should no longer be necessary. A long time ago I inadvertently started using the local MHS hub name instead of the workgroup name in NETDIR.TAB, which is now fixed. 47. Made a final correction to native SMF-71 support. XGATE now properly handles messages written in its mv\MHS\MAIL\GATES\name\OUT directory that have an SMF-71 envelope. 48. Scanning for the vector that the installed FTP kernel is using is now done before XGATE tries to load XSMTP. If the FTP kernel isn't found, XGATE will not try to load XSMTP. If you are using Charon as the SMTP server, it is now not necessary to rename or delete XSMTP.BIN so that XGATE doesn't try to load it. 41. Added a new XGATE.CFG file option called RESOLVE_MINUTES=nn. If this variable is set, XSMTP will return outbound SMTP messages that fail to resolve the host name after the specified number of minutes have expired. If a relay host is defined, this option will probably have no effect since the next cycle will pass the unresolved message to the relay. If XSMTP has the same level of reliability in reaching the Internet that your relay host does, this change should make XSMTP cleaner about returning delivery errors to your users (than a Unix box usually is) if you're inclined to disable the relay host. 42. Now uses different format in the client record area of outbound SMTP queue jobs - BE SURE THE OUTBOUND SMTP QUEUE IS EMPTY before installing this version of XGATE. 43. You can now locally define some SMTP host names in a file called "HOSTS" (such as nicknames/shortnames for commonly used hosts). The format of the HOSTS file follows the normal syntax, use one line for each host beginning with its IP address. For example: 129.194.30.5 ns-nic 128.9.0.107 isi a.isi.edu As indicated, more than one name can be given for a host. Comments can be used by preceding them with a semi-colon or pound sign. The contents of the HOSTS file are read at startup and held in memory, so don't get too carried away with adding a lot of names. Changes to the HOSTS file won't take effect until XGATE is restarted. When resolving a host name, XSMTP first scans the cached image of the HOSTS file. If the entry is resolved, the name lookup immediately terminates - otherwise the list of name servers is used as before. 44. This doesn't have much to do with E-Mail, but I couldn't resist.... XSMTP now responds to name server queries. Previously it used to ignore them. If XSMTP receives a name server query, it immediately scans the cached image of the HOSTS file and sends a reply if the name is found. If the name isn't resolved by the HOSTS file, although this is unorthodox, XSMTP immediately rebroadcasts the query to all name servers defined and logs the request in a working table. As soon as one of the name servers provides a positive reply, XSMTP relays the response back to the requesting station and closes out the active request. If a late reply comes in from one of the other name servers, it is discarded. XSMTP will timeout active requests if a positive response isn't received within 20 seconds. XSMTP performs this service asynchronously as a background task. It is a very high performance solution to simplify and expedite name server lookup's for client workstations. Workstation name server configurations can be reduced to sending just one query to XGATE and still have the benefity of being able to resolve names using all the name servers XSMTP knows about, in a parallel fashion rather than one by one.... Version 2.14 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 45. The XGATE.CFG option "append_ascii_atch" was renamed to "append_ascii_attach" in order to be consistent with other options involving file attachments. 46. Fixed a problem induced by Ver 2.13 where XSMTP might contaminate the undeliverable hours accumulated against a message, which could result in a lot of redundant warning messages going back to the sender. Version 2.15 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 47. XGATE now reacts differently to the "Sender:" field versus the "From:" field when parsing an MHS message. Previously XGATE was just taking the Sender: field and calling it the From: field when building outbound SMTP messages. This worked ok until NGM started building distribution lists with the Sender: field formated with where errors should go, and the From: field with who sent the message. Now, the two fields are built separately in the outbound SMTP message, based on their individual values. Inversely, when parsing an SMTP message, XGATE has always handled the two fields separately. 48. When sending a copy of a delivery error that was generated by "-Maiser-" to the administrator, XGATE now builds the Reply-To: address of that message with the sending SMTP user's address. Depending on whether your MHS E-Mail application handles the Reply-To: field, this can make it a lot easier for you the administrator to reply back to the sender with some type of help message. Version 2.16 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 49. Changed the connect timeout logic to use the internal FTP Kernel timeout rather than XSMTP keeping track of the time expired. Actually, what happens now is that the connect timeout (specified in XGATE.CFG) is used to set the error timeout for each net descriptor opened with the FTP kernel, so don't set it too low! (Specifying a connect timeout below 5 in XGATE.CFG now results in 5 seconds being used.) 50. When the inactivity timeout expires in the XSMTP monitor, or when the monitor is exited with a keyboard command, any filter that was active is now reset. 51. If XGATE is run with NGM 2.0, it will write inbound MHS messages into the mv\MHS\MAIL\GATES\gw_name\IN directory instead of mv\MHS\MAIL\SND. This should remove the need to disable sender validation under NGM (if it was only turned off to get XGATE working). Version 2.17 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 52. If XGATE is run with the -s switch, it no longer allocates the memory buffers that are used to do MHS message conversion. 53. When listen sockets are recycled by XSMTP (occurs after 30 minutes of not receiving a listen connection), the event is no longer logged in the scroll-back buffer. 54. A small activity wheel is now displayed in the lower right corner of XSMTP's monitor when no other flags are active (i.e. scroll-back or filtering). The reason why is so some indication of a heartbeat can be seen if running with the -S (SMTP only) switch, and also so I could tell if/when the TCP/IP transport kernel ever blocks the system for lengthy periods. Version 3.00 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 55. XGATE and XSETUP executables are now .EXE files. Make sure you delete XGATE.COM and XSETUP.COM. 56. XGATE and XSETUP now use encrypted password calls if running on NetWare 3.x or higher. If you had enabled unencrypted passwords just to run XGATE, and wish to no longer allow them - you can now turn them off. 57. After trying to do a version of XGATE that supported LAN WorkPlace, and then giving up cause it wouldn't run reliably for any period of time, and then ordering Wollongong's PathWay SDK only to find they don't support asynchronous calls, I finally gave up on using a 3rd party TCP/IP driver and sat down to write our own - that was two months ago.... The new TCP/IP protocol stack (tenatively named Mach 2) is pure high performance (totally in assembler like XGATE and XSMTP) but it was also developed for long-term stability. It loads automatically when you run XGATE, so there's nothing to load beforehand. The stack runs directly on top of either Novell ODI drivers or Clarkson Packet Drivers (or both if so desired). There isn't much to using it instead of the FTP kernel, just stop loading ETHRDRVR before running XGATE, and make appropriate changes to the new BIND and ROUTE commands at the end of XGATE.CFG. Using ODI drivers is slightly preferred over Packet Drivers because Novell's ECBs (Event Control Blocks) can receive packets fragmented across multiple buffers (which the stack takes full advantage of to manage memory buffers efficiently). When run with a Packet Driver, the stack emulates the use of ECB's - but still can't make the driver read a packet into non-contiguous buffers. We'll probably release more applications for use with the stack soon, and also release the stack itself as a kernel for in-house TCP/IP development. There's a few new menu options that have been added under XSMTP's monitor to go along with the new stack (a number of tables can be viewed, a new PING option, a Check Route option, etc...), so poke around a little bit to find everything new. If you're using ODI drivers, the only change necessary is to bind an "Ethernet_II" frame to the board in NET.CFG. For example: Link Driver NE2000 PORT 300 INT 5 MEM D0000 FRAME Ethernet_802.3 FRAME Ethernet_II If you're using Packet Drivers - there's no change necessary, just don't run the FTP kernel. The new stack can simultaneously support 100 open sockets, so you may want to change the "max_xmit_processes" option in XGATE.CFG to a higher number. The only reason why we've kept the "max_xmit_processes" option is because you still can't open more than 40 simultaneous sessions (by default) unless you raise the number of file handles in NET.CFG. 58. XGATE now stops scanning for outbound MHS mail if the SMTP outbound mail queue has reached 250 messages. This needed to be done because a NetWare job queue can only hold 255 messages. If another job is posted after 255 messages are queued, the queue rolls over to zero messages and all previous jobs are lost. 59. When the number of queued outbound SMTP messages exceeds 20, the "MailQ" display now starts to blink. 60. XGATE now resolves its own host name without querying the name servers. (Like why hadn't it done this before?) 61. XSMTP will now accept an inbound SMTP message with a null "MAIL FROM:<>" field instead of generating a 501 Syntax Error. Null "MAIL FROM:" fields are permissible under RFC-821 when the intent is to keep error messages (and other types of notifications) from generating error messages. A null RCPT FROM: field technically won't stop XGATE from returning an error though - because it still just simply hands all inbound messages to MHS and if MHS wants to generate an error, XGATE doesn't question it. 62. Added a new command line switch, -M, which forces MHS-mode only. This is now needed if for some reason you want to split XGATE across two computers - one for SMTP (uses the -S switch) and one for MHS (using the new -M switch). Previously you could just not load the FTP kernel on the computer that would only do the MHS message conversion engine and since XGATE wouldn't see the FTP kernel it wouldn't load XSMTP - but now XGATE will try to run its own TCP/IP stack with XSMTP if it sees an ODI driver or a Packet Driver (which covers a lot of normal driver configurations) so we needed a new switch to explicitly tell XGATE not to load the TCP/IP stack. If this doesn't make any sense - don't lose sleep. Its mainly for debugging purposes. 63. The old use of the -I command line switch (to service SMTP process from within the MS-DOS function dispatcher) has been renamed to -P. The -I switch is now used to enable ICMP messages within the XSMTP monitor. 64. When returning a -Maiser- error message to an SMTP user, the address the message is sent to is now based on what was passed to XGATE at the RFC-821 (mailer level) "MAIL From:" field when XGATE first received the original message. Previously, XGATE would always use what was passed in the MHS "Send-To:" header field, which MHS would have constructed based on what was in the "Sender:" field of the problem message. Well sometimes a SMTP message has a Sender: field for a different reason, so we couldn't just set the Sender: field with the RFC-821 "MAIL From:" field. So what we're doing now is saving what was passed as the RFC-821 "MAIL From:" value as a separate X-SMTP-Envelope-From: field in the MHS message, and using it for the return address if the message is an error report from -Mailser-. In SMTP non-delivery notices are usually detected and handled at the RFC-821 level (the handshaking that occurs between SMTP's), not at the RFC-822 level where the message header is processed. By consuming some extra disk I/O and CPU utilization, SMTP processes running in the back- ground could validate users before saying "250 <....> Recipient OK. But that would only work for users on the local MHS host, so this is what we ended up with. The reason for the change is that sometimes the RFC-821 "MAIL From:" address is different than the RFC-822 "Sender:", especially in the case of when a message comes from a list server. In this case, its important that non-delivery notifications go back to the RFC-821 "MAIL From:", so that the delivery error won't get echoed to everyone on the list server (cause a lot of list servers don't set the RFC-822 "Sender:" field to an error mailbox). 65. MHS message processing is now handled as a process like individual SMTP processes are. This means that while the XSMTP monitor is active, MHS scanning and processing will now still occur. As a result, the automatic timeout where the XSMTP monitor would return to the MHS activity screen after 15 minutes of inactivity has now been disabled. 66. MHS gateway activity now has its own scroll-back buffer. This means the "scroll-back_lines" parameter in XGATE.CFG to define XSMTP's scroll-back buffer had to be renamed to support another one for MHS. So now there's two scroll-back fields in XGATE.CFG: mhs_scrollback_lines 50 ;MHS Activity scroll back lines. smtp_scrollback_lines 100 ;SMTP Monitor scroll back lines. 67. A new XGATE.CFG option, PING, allows a host to be PING'd on a recurring basis. This could be useful if your access to the Internet is through a dial-in link that disconnects after a period of inactivity, and you want something to generate recurring traffic through the link so that the inactivity timeout won't occur. The format of the PING command is: PING <ip_address> [minutes] The ip_address is the host you want to Ping. Minutes is the number of minutes inbetween Ping's generated. If it isn't given, a value of 1 is assumed. Ping activity generated by this option won't show in XSMTP's monitor unless XGATE is started with the -I (ICMP) command line switch. Only one PING command can be active in XGATE.CFG. 68. The NATIVE_SMF71 option in XGATE.CFG can now be enabled even if NETDIR.TAB indicates a SMF version older than 71. This allows raw SMTP addressing (raw = without an MHS extended address) to work when XGATE is used with a message router that supports domain or hint routing but isn't a SMF-71 router. 69. The -P command line switch (change #64) has been permamently retired. Its functionality is now built-in (per change #66). 70. XGATE no longer logs itself in as a job server when it starts. Instead, either a valid user with the proper SMTP queue privileges must already be logged in when XGATE is started or, a user name (and optional password) can now be specified on the command line. When XGATE is quit, it now no longer logs itself out either. So this is now basically pretty close to the same way you start up MHS. To grant the right SMTP queue privileges to an existing user account, XGATE's Setup program now has an option to do that. The advantage of switching to this approach is that you can now stick XGATE out on a file server volume without going through the previous headaches (and such things as print mappings will now remain in place). If you still want XGATE to do the login for you, you can now specify a user name (and optional password) as parameters on XGATE's command line and it will attempt to login as that user when starting up. For example: XGATE xgate[,password] If the user account has a password assigned, then it must be expressed on the command line - XGATE will not prompt for it. (Command line switches may be located either in front of or in back of the login name or password.) 71. NSLookups launched as part of a Telnet/25 or Ping process are no longer verbose unless the -N switch is used at startup. 72. Free'd up about 40K of memory by consolidating a couple buffers. 73. The <Tab> key now works to rotate between the Gateway Activities screen and the SMTP Monitor. 74. When decoding a uuencoded block of text, XGATE no longer considers a truncated line to be an error (a line that has fewer characters before the Cairrage Return than what the 1st control character indicated should be there). Instead, XGATE now assumes that the remaining characters were trailing spaces that had been removed by a text editor (some Unix editors have this "feature"). 75. Added a new option in XGATE.CFG (static_reply_address=Y|N) that allows an alternate reply address format of "gateway @ workgroup {smtp_address}". If mail is addressed to an SMTP user with XGATE's gateway name in the user name position, and the workgroup name in its normal position, MHS will still route the message just fine to XGATE. If you'd prefer to use this style of addressing (or find its easier to describe to MHS users), try enabling the "static_reply_address" option.