Telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

Here's something that I found many years ago and surprisingly it's still around.  If you've ever wondered what Star Wars would look like in ASCII then give it a shot.  It's the entire first Star Wars movie in text... they say that using IPv6 gives some color and extra scenes but I have not tried it myself.

At any rate give it a shot.. if you're a nerd it WILL be time well spent.

Checking Sendmail on AIX via Telnet

Having an issue today with an AIX box not being able to send SMTP msg's, even after being added to the Anonymous Receive Connector in Exchange 2010.  Apparently the error below is due to Sendmail  doing a PTR check on the host that's performing the telnet'ing, for some reason my workstation is having an issue.

Except in checking the Reverse Lookup Zone for my domain name, my host has the correct name and IP.  Had a tech in a different site try the same thing, 

And come to find out I cannot test the Oracle package 'utl-smtp' like this since it's version of SendMail doesn't work like the regular one. I did wind up having to re-evaluate our Receive Connectors and come to find out there were some overlapping coverages with regards to Anonymous Users.  After getting all that cleared up, then getting the DBS to verify both servers were using fully qualified addresses as the Mail From:, notifications from Oracle began flowing correctly.