I spent today having a look at some of the stuff from the University’s Planning and Quality Office (PQO). They have a single SQL Server for development, test and production which has full open access inside the University that are able to connect to their database though fortunately for them SQL Server at least enforces passwords. Its empty so far and they want to export XML from it for their work with ERA. PQO also want access back into ePrints for their RPCS system and we want access to theirs so I’m not sure how that will go.

There was an ePrints meeting about security, firewall zones and access to different systems. The security team want to put the new system into the DMZ and ensure that it can’t get back into the internal systems which complicates issues with the PQO people a little bit depending on where their server goes. There was also a cosmetic change in the dev system for ePrints that we’ll push up sooner or later.

Microsoft’s Forefront Security for Exchange is successfully nuking my DLL files in a ZIP files which would be very useful except for the fact that I wanted to send those DLL files and do something legit with them without having to work out how to subvert Microsoft faux security system.

I also did some more looks with Moodle and it’s email fun. There are a whole heap of headers which seem to do different things. Microsoft seems to want the “x-auto-response-suppress” header, auto-submitted seems to be another header whilst precedence and x-priority seem to be the traditional approach used to prevent autoreply/out of office stuff being sent. There are unfortunately issues with each option such as some causing different systems to behave badly, Microsoft solution works for only Microsoft systems. Eventually we want to permit non delivery receipts and disabling the invalid emails automatically with Moodle and eventually causing less spam.