[H-GEN] Exchange Woes

[Adrian Sutton]

Hi all,
Yesterday we discovered our primary domain controller and exchange 
server had a hard drive crash.  This is the second time it's crashed in 
the past year, last time it took a week to recover and it's looking bad 
for this time as well, despite having some very knowledgeable Windows 
server admins set up the backup system.

Basically, we need a more robust system in the face of catastrophic 
disaster - particularly something that isn't tightly coupled with 
Active Directory.  All we really use Active Directory for is to run 
exchange which is only used for:

a) email.  Nothing fancy - about 15 users and 9GB of email data.
b) Storing email in public folders.
c) pretty basic calendar functions.  Reminders that pop up on screen 
and grab your attention are a must here.

We don't use roaming profiles and can do without the central login 
pretty easily.  We have a mix of windows, solaris and Mac clients 
though accessing email and calendar is exclusively done from Windows 
atm.

We have a Sun e250 server sitting around doing pretty much nothing that 
could be used or a linux or windows server could be set up.  There is 
no knowledge in the company of server administration at all but a 
particular fear of UNIX systems.

Since there's a whole bunch of very talented sys admins around here 
that mostly don't use exchange - what systems could we put in place?  
Muchos bonus points if it's free - even more if you can come up with a 
way to convince people that we can maintain it easily (there's no 
sysadmin in this company, just a bunch of programmers).

Thanks,

Adrian Sutton.

----------------------------------------------
Intencha "tomorrow's technology today"
Ph: 38478913 0422236329
Suite 8/29 Oatland Crescent
Holland Park West 4121
Australia QLD
www.intencha.com