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06-17-2010 - Serv-U to Aid Ailing Mail Server

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Hello,

Welcome to another installment of the RhinoSoft.com newsletter. You are getting this newsletter because you signed up on our web site. If you would like to stop receiving these newsletters, please visit: http://www.RhinoSoft.com/newsletter/unsubscribe.asp

The intent of this newsletter is to give you some pointers on our products. This newsletter covers my recent use of Serv-U to prevent a mailing problem for our newsletter subscribers.

Serv-U to Aid Ailing Mail Server

As many of our newsletter subscribers recall, we recently had a problem with our on-line systems that allowed a spammer to use the newsletter email address, newsletter@rhinosoft.com to send all subscribers a DNS4Me trial ID. Since there are tens of thousands of subscribers to our monthly newsletter, the CPU and bandwidth load on our mail server was very high. For various reasons, including Windows performance issues with directories with very large numbers of files, the server needed human intervention.

Part of my daily routine is to check our servers every morning and every evening from home, just to make sure there are no company-wide issues. As part of my morning routine, I quickly saw there was a problem. The solution was to move all queued email files to temporary directories, download them to my home computer, verify the content of each message, then upload the valid messages.

Our mail server also runs a copy of Serv-U Gold. Using FTP Voyager I connected to the server, navigated to the message queue and moved the files to a temporary location in order to prevent the email server from sending the bogus messages.

I then used the "Power Download" feature in FTP Voyager to download all of the files to my local computer. The "Power Download" feature is a great tool to use when transferring many small files because the overhead of the protocol is minimized as FTP Voyager and Serv-U are able to take advantage of more bandwidth; in other words transfer as much data as possible using the available bandwidth. My copy of FTP Voyager is configured to use 10 connections for "Power Upload" and "Power Download". Instead of transferring tens of thousands of files in hours I was able to transfer all of the email messages in a matter of minutes.

After the files were on my computer, I searched the content of these files using Microsoft Developer Studio for unique identifiers, and created a list of the bogus messages. I created a batch file, based on this list of files, to simply delete the files. The remaining files were all valid messages. I uploaded the valid message files to the proper queue directories on the mail server, solving the entire problem in a matter of 30 minutes.

Serv-U Performance On a Busy Server

Our mail server is a very nice server running dual Xeon processors and Windows Server 2003 32-bit with 4GB of RAM. It's not an overly powerful server so it was being taxed by both Windows and the mail server software. Serv-U is designed to be efficient and run smoothly even in the most severe situations as here. Serv-U is designed to take advantage of today's computing environments where multiple CPUs and multi-core processors are in service.

While using Serv-U to manage the email situation, Serv-U was able to transfer tens of thousands of files without interfering with the mail server software on the server. It was able to use all available bandwidth without concern. In fact, when I developed the plan to solve the situation I didn't hesitate to rely on either Serv-U or FTP Voyager. Both performed flawlessly.

Without either of these products I would have been forced to go on-site and install software on the mail server to solve the problem. With Serv-U and FTP Voyager I was able to work from home and save our newsletter subscribers from undesired messages.

Try Serv-U Free for 30 Days

Download Serv-U:
http://www.Serv-U.com/download/

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http://www.RhinoSoft.com/customer

Thank you for taking the time to read.

Mark P. Peterson - President
http://www.RhinoSoft.com
Voice: +1(262) 560-9627
FAX: +1(262) 560-9628