[Box Backup] notifyadmin.*

[Chris Wilson]

On Mon, 31 Aug 2009, scartomail wrote:

> I was checking out the notifyadmin.* file. It seems it not possible to 
> add a password for the mailserver.

Rather, nobody has written code to support it yet. It may be possible 
using Microsoft's SMTP component on Windows, see here:

   http://kb.seekdotnet.com/ViewArticle/152data.aspx

CDO.Message also supports SMTP Authentication, so if the client is part of 
a domain, and Box Backup runs as a domain user, it should be able to 
authenticate to the mail server as the domain user.

Local sendmail on Unix should not require a password anyway.

> It could ofcourse be added if I program it that way but passwords in 
> plain text files is never a good idea.
>
> Unfortunatly mailserver(allmost all of them) want passwords if mail is 
> send(spam protection).

Local mailservers should accept inbound mail without a password without 
problems. I.e. you can send mail to yourself from BB, but not to third 
parties.

> Because BB uses OpenSSL, I was wondering is there a way that I could 
> setup a mailserver on the BB server and use that as the mailserver to 
> send my notify mails to? Even if the client is not on the local subnet, 
> but somewhere behind firewalls and routers.

The notify script is not part of BB, just called by it. So it makes no 
difference whether BB uses openssl or not.

> In other wordsm is there an VPN between the client and server when the 
> notifyadmin.* script kicks in? Or is there a different solution that 
> don't know of?

No, there is no VPN, there may or may not be an SSL connection but this is 
not a VPN and can only be used for the Box Backup protocol, not for 
sending email (at the moment). In any case it might not be up, for example 
the script may be called to report that the backup failed because the 
connection was terminated. In this case there is of course no connection 
by the time the script is called.

What you might be able to do, depending on your mail server, is to use 
your Box Backup client certificate as authentication to connect to the 
mail server, as well as the BB server. Unfortunately, CDO.Message does not 
support this method of client authentication, so you may need to use 
another component.

Cheers, Chris.
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