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I'm trying to control a mail server from Perl (ArGoSoft Mail Server .NET). All it provides for this purpose is a .NET remoting interface (read more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Remoting).

I'm not very familiar with .NET and all my system is based on Apache and Perl (some on Windows, some on Linux). I need to control the mail server from Perl, being able to see, add or delete domains and users, along with other related stuff. All that can be done using the remoting interface, which is actually used by the ArGoSoft Web Interface, which naturally runs only on IIS.

I'm trying to find a way to communicate with that remoting interface from Perl. Again, I'm not very familiar with .NET, but seems to be some kind of web service that uses binary data. If I try to connect to it from telnet, I cannot do anything and reponds with an error as soon as I start typing anything.

Also, I used a sniffer to see the communication between the Web Interface and the remoting interface and 50% of what I got was binary data.

So, I'm wondering if someone here can think of a possible solution to this.

Thanks in advance,

Francisco

Francisco Zarabozo
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1 Answers1

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I suspect that your only reasonable solution would be to write a .NET wrapper that talks to the server and exposes an interface that Perl programs can access. Options would be COM (if Perl can do COM...I don't know), an HTTP interface or a custom TCP interface.

Talking to the Remoting interface directly would be very difficult. You would have to write a binary deserializer for the .NET objects that are being passed around. It would probably take longer to write the deserializer than it would take to learn enough .NET programming (if you don't know it) to write the wrapper.

You can write the .NET wrapper in any .NET-supported language: C#, F#, Visual Basic .NET, Managed C++, etc.

Jim Mischel
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  • Yes, Perl can do COM. I tried to create a wrapper some time ago in VS2010, referencing a DLL from the mail server to expose the methods via COM, but it failed with a message "The referenced assembly doesn't have a safe name". I contacted the author of the mail server asking him to correct that and he said he would, but he just hasn't after a long time. Do you think I can write a wrapper without referencing anything? – Francisco Zarabozo Mar 20 '13 at 01:53
  • The only time you should have a problem with that is if you're trying to create a strong-named assembly. If you're building an internal tool, then that shouldn't cause you any trouble. See http://stackoverflow.com/q/6370753/56778. – Jim Mischel Mar 20 '13 at 02:41
  • If I remember well, the problem was that only signed assemblies can be made COM visible and, in order to sign it, all referenced assemblies must have strong names. I'm going to try it again without signing it, maybe I was missing something. – Francisco Zarabozo Mar 20 '13 at 03:32
  • That might be it. If that's the case, you can always build a socket interface. Might even be easier. . . – Jim Mischel Mar 20 '13 at 03:35
  • I just discovered that by using the Web Mail of ArGoSoft Mail Server, which runs necessarily on IIS, I get access to a WSDL interface which pretty much is a proxy to the remoting interface, so I think I'll just use SOAP in Perl to do all operations. Thanks anyway for you help. :-) – Francisco Zarabozo Mar 21 '13 at 10:44