Sending Email

Next up for my little scripting project is to send some email from our IT's mail relay.

There are a several nice Ruby gems that can make sending mail easy to do. Two are Pony and Mail. Pony is super simple, so I went with that for this script. Mail has a lot of features for importing body text, attachments and other great stuff. I will probably use it in a web application.

I would post some demo code, but it's basically right there in the GitHub Read Me.

I did run into some trouble. I got an error connecting to my IT department's relay.

/Users/garthcolasurdo/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.2-p318/lib/ruby/1.9.1/openssl/ssl-internal.rb:121:in `post_connection_check': hostname was not match with the server certificate (OpenSSL::SSL::SSLError)

Stack Overflow asked and answered. By adding:

:openssl_verify_mode => 'none'

to my

:via_options => {...}

I'm receiving email from my department's relay.

Move password expiration script from ColdFusion to Ruby

Today I started an interesting project migrating a ColdFusion scheduled task to Ruby. Why would we do such a thing? We have a number of problems with our CF server, primarily the CF spooler has been sending two copies of our organization's notice of password expiration. We've investigated and researched and have never come up with a satisfactory (or logical) solution for it. In addition our unit is moving away from CF and to Ruby on Rails for our application development. It would be in our interest to migrate existing business processes to the new environment.

Me, I'm struggling to get up to speed on Rails. I still maintain a lot of CF code and I have at least two current projects being actively developed in CF. I can support our other developer with html, css, testing and mock ups, but I just can't quite get on the Rails train yet.

My boss, probably at the suggestion of our other dev, assigned me to rewrite our failing expiration notification script in Ruby. This I can probably do. And I'll probably learn a lot about Ruby along the way. I'll break this down in our usual SBAR format.

Situation: Our organization expires passwords every six months. We should probably warn our users when their expiration is coming due; at 30, 14, 7, 3, 2 and 1 day. A script that runs every morning should search the LDAP looking for upcoming expirations, and at those intervals send an email.

Background: We have a working ColdFusion script and a history of utilizing our organization's LDAP. ColdFusion was quick and easy to set up, but there are problems with our server. Additionally, our unit is moving away from CF development. Developing a new script should not be difficult since the logic and assets are readily available. Hopefully, we can return responsibility of this business process to the Identity Management unit and not take so much flack for what the warnings do or do not do.

Analysis: To accomplish this project I have created the following tasks:

1. Connect to LDAP with Ruby
2. Report contents of LDAP in Ruby
3. Refine LDAP results
4. Send email to myself
5. Build logic structure based on existing code
6. Test locally
7. Deploy on server
8. Test on server
9. Schedule as chron job

Results: Successfully find and send expiration notices daily.