Bytes and Bites of Internet
Archive for May, 2012
Setting up SMTP server in Windows .. to use Gmail
May 26th
Email notification is one of the most common method to provide update to users for various system events be it task completion/failures, system issues, reports etc. I have to use email notification time to time for all of those items. Once biggest complain in windows for emails is it doesn’t allow you to use basic authentication. Which means that you can’t use external SMTP servers (say Google or Yahoo) for sending email from Windows, you will always have to have your OWN SMTP server like Exchange server or other 3rd party Software. But if you have IIS 6.0 (or 5.0 I think) installed in a system you can use a feature called “Virtual SMTP Server” which can be used as … any guess ?? … yup, A SMTP Server. Since it is a virtual one it doesn’t have all bells ‘n whistles of real servers but it gets job done. It is actually ideal for basic email notification purposes and that’s just what I need 
. In rest of the post I am using Virtual SMTP Server (using IIS) and SMTP server interchangeably but in reality both are very different.
I am using Windows Server 2008 R2, so these steps are for same OS but I am sure that this process is very similar in previous versions as well. All you have to do is to open up “Server Manager” and goto “Features” section. And click on “Add Feature” this will open up “Add Features Wizard”, from that list of all features select “SMTP Server”. As soon as you select that check box a message will popup about IIS, that it will install additional IIS components too (it is because this virtual smtp server is a feature of IIS). Let wizard install required components of SMTP server.
Next is configuration of SMTP server. In this step we configure that server to use Gmail’s SMTP server to send emails. For that open up IIS 6 Manager, you should see a node called “SMTP Virtual Server # 1” it is a virtual SMTP server created by default (which can be renamed/deleted). Right click on it and select “properties”.
First tab is “General” which can be used to enable logging for troubleshooting. If you want to setup access to SMTP server it can be done using second tab “Access”. In that tab, in “Access Control” section click on “Authentication”. Authentication can be applied using various method but I chose “Anonymous Access” because many windows utilities and MSFT programs doesn’t support basic authentication. And with Anonymous Access selected anyone with local access can use that server to send emails.
Accessing XAMPP MySQL database remotely + locally
May 19th
This weekend, I was playing around with XAMPP which I am thinking to use for my quest to become familiar with WordPress development. For those who don’t know what the hack is XAMPP, it is cousin of WAMP and it basically provides development environment for PHP based applications (e.g. WordPress). It is basically combo package of essential modules like Apache, MySQL, PHP and few other add-ons (Mercury and Tomcat). Good thing about using packages like XAMPP or WAMP is when we install them they just configure all components to talk with each other so you don’t need to do any kind juggling for setting up each of those individual components before using them 
. On internet there are many walkthroughs available about to how to setup XAMPP, so I am not going explain that process.
But here in my case, I have a virtual machine where I have installed XAMPP and I wanted to access that MySQL database from my host system. Main reason for that is I never liked phpMyAdmin to manage MySQL instance and MySQL Workbench is by far very flexible and less confusing to use. I already have MySQL Workbench installed in my local system and I wanted to use that application to access database located in my virtual machine. I must say that if it was SQL Server it is very straight forward process but I didn’t expect that it will be really difficult to setup for MySQL ! Because by default use don’t have permission to access MySQL instance remotely and you have to configure server logins to have permissions to access database remotely. And may be I am wrong, but it looks like that users are bound with specific IP so that user has access to server only from that specified IP (or IP range).
MAPS in SSRS
May 6th
In SQL Server 2008 R2 Microsoft introduced really cool new feature … MAPS. With that user can use their existing data on top of maps to have better visualization of information (say customer base distributed across USA). What’s really good about this feature is user can use maps from maps gallery, or spatial data or ESRI (Environmental System Research Institute) shape files, hell you can even add bing maps background on top of it ! In short I think maps add one more tool in BI arsenal 
For this demo, I have used VS 2010 and SQL Server 2012 for generating map report. I have my little table based on AdventureWorks 2012 which I am using as data source for this report. First step is create new report project in VS. And add new report, create new database connection (for data source) and a query (for data set).
select StateProvinceCode,count(1) as TotalCustomers from tablebar
where countryregioncode = 'US' group by StateProvinceCode order by StateProvinceCode
My above query gets count of customers per state and sorted by state. So this report basically shows count of customers located in each state of USA. Once that is done, its time to design the report. All you need is to drop map control in empty report area. As soon as you drop map control in report, it will start layer wizard. This wizard is used to set different settings of map, like map type, data source for map, layout etc.
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