John Croson's Blog Home

I've been using GFI Faxmaker since around version 10, but mostly in Exchange environments, and usually trying to get it to work with a variety of analog modems. Image via Wikipedia I have a customer that's moving to a hosted Exchange solution, and we've just moved the last of the users mailboxes off-site. Now came the simple task of pointing the Email2FAXGateway settings to send mail to the hosted servers. We don't use GFI Faxmaker to send, so won't have to resort to any special TextAPI formatting, outlined at GFI's support site. We initially performed a test, sending inbound fax messages directly to the hosted servers, and it seemed to work well, but a few days later noticed there was a problem. I think what was happening was the hosting mail servers performed an RDNS ( reverse DNS ) lookup, which fails, since mail sent out of GFI appears to be coming from faxmaker.com. The solution was to set up IIS SMTP services, and relay all messages to our hosting...

This Bio was written by my employer. I was very flattered... John likes to refer to himself as a “jack of all trades”, but his experience and knowledge of technical and operating systems make him anything but a generalist. John’s background in information systems ranges from development of software , to design and implementation of hardware compatibilities, to key management-related duties, such as cost containment and budgeting, and training. When John started his career in the IT field, he was the Technology Operations Manager for a local art museum in Racine, WI . In that job, he maintained a heterogeneous 2-site environment for this organization while managing various IT-related projects. As he moved further with his career, he provided IT support and development with an IT consulting firm . His accomplishments here included the maintenance, administration and building of a multi-server environment, as well as implementing the related policies and procedures for network securi...

John Croson 2121 Taylor Avenue • Racine, WI 53403 • 262-237-8227 • john@croson.us 8 years of cross-platform experience in systems administration including analyzing, designing, installing, maintaining, and repairing hardware, software, peripherals and networks. Superior troubleshooting and technical support abilities with migrations, network connectivity, and security and database applications. Develop exceptional relationships with co-workers, management and end users. Excellent communication and problem solving skills Skills Technical Operating System Network Administration Server Design Internet / Intranet Configuration Hardware / Software Maintenance Security Testing / Patching Backup Solution Processing Technical / User Support VBA Solution Provider Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, XP Clients Windows NT, 2000, 2003 Server Apple OS 9, OS X Linux Redhat, Debian, Gentoo, SuSE, Mandrake, Slackware, FreeBSD Cisco IOS Managerial Software Cost Containment & Budgeti...

Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife Out of the box, DotNetNuke provides a method of programatically creating a search-engine friendly XML sitemap for easy website submissions to the likes of Google , Yahoo and others that accept that format. This is one of the first things to do in your quest for SEO . What it doesn't do, is accurately give a priority to pages. A priority is used by webmasters to set a level of imporance to a webpage. These numbers range from 0.0 to 1.0. All DotNetNuke sites prior to 5 assign a default value of 0.9 to all pages. Google, and others don't like the fact that all your pages have the same priority, which will likely cause them not to index your site. After doing a bit of research, I found a quick hack in the DotNetNuke forums , that assigns priorities based on page placement in your menu. 1 to your home page , 0.9 to all other first level pages, 0.8 to second level pages, and so on. Just recently I've found another approach outlined ...