[H-GEN] Exchange Woes

Sarah Walters s.walters at its.uq.edu.au
Mon Apr 19 19:52:10 EDT 2004


Hi Adrian,

I haven't done this myself (yet ...) but here's a few quick thoughts 
that might point you in the right direction.

Adrian Sutton wrote:
> 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.

I run cyrus imap at home. It's truly fantastic, and it does have the 
concept of permissions on folders to allow others to view it. I believe 
this is the heart of the Mirapoint email appliance. The one time I had a 
corrupt sector on my disk it took out the indexing of the mailboxes, and 
a simple command-line tool supplied with the software reindexed all my 
mailboxes.

> b) Storing email in public folders.

Cyrus also has the concept of folders in a separate hierarchy 
(shared.foldername instead of users.username) with granular permissions.

> c) pretty basic calendar functions.  Reminders that pop up on screen and 
> grab your attention are a must here.

Okay, a few options here. Outlook, Mozilla Calendar and Konqueror can 
all talk friendly via iCal/vCal attachments to email. You create a 
meeting request and enter the email addresses and email the request 
around. Then simply use the software to manage separate calendars. For 
such a small group of users this might be easiest.

Alternatively, have a look at OpenGroupware. This is an open-source 
groupware server which may meet your requirements. Unfortunately you 
will need a non-free plugin if you want to use it from within Outlook, 
but other programs can freely use it. It also has a web interface, which 
is handy for people on the go.

http://www.opengroupware.org/screens/index.html

> 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.

You'll be able to access from any client with the above suggestions. I 
think you can get most systems to authenticate against an LDAP server if 
you really want to.

> 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.

Solaris, FreeBSD or Linux would all be good options, and should all run 
quite happily on an e250.

> 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).

Suggested options are all free, hardest part would be keeping the 
OpenGroupware server up-to-date since you'll probably need to compile 
it. You should be able to keep the rest up to date easily. FreeBSD ports 
are very pleasant to keep updated, or use standard package management on 
your platform of choice.

-- 
Sarah Walters
Systems Programmer, Software Infrastructure
Information Technology Services
The University of Queensland, Australia
Phone: (07) 33654359
Email: s.walters at its.uq.edu.au




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