Microsoft Outlook calendar generates invalid unique identifiers for the UID property? - outlook

I exported a .ics file from Microsoft Outlook calendar. The .ics file contained this UID property:
UID:Ooldc6nEFUK0B6AS7oLh8w==
Here is another UID generated by Microsoft Outlook calendar:
UID:sSfe/XDnb0qy6JvmOrlKMg==
According to RFC 7986, the value of both of those UIDs is invalid. Specifically, the first one contains the invalid equals ( = ) symbol and the second one contains the invalid forward slash ( / ) symbol (as well as the invalid equals symbol).
Do you agree that the above UID values are invalid?
Do you know what rules Microsoft Outlook calendar follows in generating UID values? Perhaps they generate UID values as Base64 strings?
I am creating a .ics validator tool. Should my tool flag the above UID values as invalid? What rules should I use in my validator tool for validating UID values?
Here's what RFC 7986 says about UID values:
This specification updates [RFC5545] by stating that "UID" values MUST
NOT include any data that might identify a user, host, domain, or any
other security- or privacy-sensitive information. It is RECOMMENDED
that calendar user agents now generate "UID" values that are
hex-encoded random Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) values as
defined in Sections 4.4 and 4.5 of [RFC4122].
If calendar user agents choose to use other forms of opaque identifiers for the "UID" value, they MUST have a length less than 255
octets and MUST conform to the "iana-token" ABNF syntax defined in
Section 3.1 of [RFC5545].
Here’s how RFC 5545 defines “iana-token”:
iana-token = 1*(ALPHA / DIGIT / "-")

Related

"=?utf-8?Q??=" in To: field with Outlook and MailChimp

I can't find much information on this problem aside from issues with Code Igniter and long subjects (my subject is < 20 chars). I sent a campaign with MailChimp, and found that when using Outlook (Gmail web is fine), the To: field says "=?utf-8?Q??=" instead of the recipient name.
What could cause this?
The To header below encodes an empty string (nothing between two ?'s in =?utf-8?Q??=:
To: =?utf-8?Q??= <MyName#MyCompanyName.com>
Either get rid of the utf-8 encoding or actually provide a display name
To: =?utf-8?Q?Some Name?= <MyName#MyCompanyName.com>

How to create a cfcollection / verity collection with a UTF-8 character in the name?

I'd just like to be able to use a UTF-8 character in the name of the collection. We base our code logic on the names of the collections which are related to a given company. This new company has an abbreviation of XØZ3, and both the CFAdminstrator and cfcollection seem to have issues with using the ø in the collection name.
The errors presented are:
Unable to create collection peoplexscvdocsXØZ3.
Unable to create collection peoplexscvdocsxøz3.
An error occurred while creating the collection: com.verity.api.administration.ConfigurationException: Fail to create the index. (-6220)
If verity doesn't accept UTF-8 and there isn't a work around, I guess you'll have to
have 2 fields, one with ascii based version of the character, one with the html/xml version of the character
pass through the ascii version of the characters when searching the collection to match
so you'd have:
plaintext: XOZ3
XMLText: X&#216Z3;
And a function that takes Ø and changes it to O when searching verity on the plaintext field and return the matching XMLText field

SNMP4J - OID Output Options - Hex-STRING as STRING

I'm using SNMP4J to read info of devices with SNMP. Now I found some devices which represent the system name (OID iso.3.6.1.2.1.1.5.0) as a Hex-STRING instead of a STRING.
To show the system name I use the following code:
Variable var = response.getVariable(new OID(".1.3.6.1.2.1.1.5.0"));
System.out.println(var.toString());
Where response is a PDU object.
If the system name is represented as a STRING value, this goes as I expected. When it is represented as a Hex-STRING, it just prints the Hex value.
Example:
Take the name of the system as "SYSTEM NAME".
With STRING it prints "SYSTEM NAME".
With Hex-STRING it prints "53:59:53:54:45:4d:20:4e:41:4d:45"
Now with snmpwalk in command line I can just use the -Oa flag. This makes all Hex-STRING values show as STRING. Is it possible to use this flag in SNMP4J or is there a similar option?
I'm not sure where you're getting the term "Hex-STRING" from. SNMP does not define such a data type. I suggest you read through the relevant RFC documents, they are publicly available from IETF. The wikipedia article for SNMP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Network_Management_Protocol#References) has an excellent reference list, you can start with browsing the ones marked as "STD".
In SNMP, all strings are subtypes (or in a different word, "restrictions") of OCTET-STRING, a byte string of indeterminate length. It may contain any data, even non-printable stuff, representing a jpeg image or whatever.
Some textual-conventions have been defined, which restrict the data to some specific byte range, or length. A DisplayString is defined to only contain bytes from the NVT ASCII character set, so the user may trust it to be printable.
In fact, sysName is defined to be a DisplayString with a max length of 255 characters.
sysName OBJECT-TYPE
SYNTAX DisplayString (SIZE (0..255))
Since a good SNMP manager is aware of RFC1213-MIB, which defines both sysName and DisplayString, the manager should assume that the data received is printable ASCII characters.
When you say "When it is represented as a Hex-STRING", what do you mean? "Represented" where, on the agent or in your Java code or when using the net-snmp "snmpwalk" command?
The var.toString() call should convert the contents of the variable into something that could be safely printed in a terminal, so it's possible that SNMP4j is converting any binary string to a hex string.

What is the length and characters in ids generated by elasticsearch?

The documentation of elastic search states:
The index operation can be executed without specifying the id. In such
a case, an id will be generated automatically.
But it does not provide any information about the properties of the ids.
What is the length (minimun/maximum)?
my guess is 22.
Which characters are used in the id?
My guess is [-_A-Za-z0-9]
Can the properties of the generated ids change at any time (is that part of the API)?
Auto-generated ids are random base64-encoded UUIDs. The base64 algorithm is used in URL-safe mode hence - and _ characters might be present in ids.
Auto-generated ids by elasticsearch are exactly 20 characters length (not 22 characters) and encoded by url-safe base64 algorithm [-_A-Za-z0-9].
Read more in documentation: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/master/index-doc.html#_autogenerating_ids

MAPI: Format of PR_SEARCH_KEY

Does anyone know the format of the MAPI property PR_SEARCH_KEY?
The online documentation has this to say about it:
The search key is formed by
concatenating the address type (in
uppercase characters), the colon
character ':', the e-mail address in
canonical form, and the terminating
null character.
And the exchange document MS-OXOABK says this:
The PidTagSearchKey property of type
PtypBinary is a binary value formed by
concatenating the ASCII string "EX: "
followed by the DN for the object
converted to all upper case, followed
by a zero byte value.
However all the MAPI messages I've seen with this property have it as some sort of binary 16 byte sequence that looks like a GUID. Does anyone else have any more information about it? Is it always 16 bytes?
Thanks!
I believe that the property PR_SEARCH_KEY will be of different formats for different objects (as alluded to by Moishe).
A MAPI message object will have a unique value assigned on creation for PR_SEARCH_KEY, however if the object is copied this property value is copied also. I presume when you reply to an e-mail, Exchange will assign the PR_SEARCH_KEY value to be the original message's value.
You will need to inspect each object type to understand how the PR_SEARCH_KEY is formed but I doubt if it's always 16 bytes for all MAPI types.
This link USENET discussion has a good discussion with Dmitry Streblechenko involved who is an expert on Extended MAPI.
The sentence before the ones you quoted from the online docs reads, "MAPI uses specific rules for constructing search keys for message recipients" which makes me think that it's talking about the PR_SEARCH_KEY property on MAPI_MAILUSER objects -- or at least not on MAPI_MESSAGE objects.

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