[H-GEN] Exchange Woes

[Robert Brockway]

On Tue, 20 Apr 2004, Adrian Sutton wrote:

> 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.

I encourage your company to face it's fear.  I did this with my fear or
heights and am much happier for having done it :)

> 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

Not sure if you've used Unix in production environments much but for the
most part the systems just don't break.  Infact this sometimes leads
people to ignore them for months on end but it is important to always keep
up with security updates[2].

> sysadmin in this company, just a bunch of programmers).

I want to concur with Sarah Holling's suggestion of getting in a Sysadmin
(fulltime, parttime or contract).

Get someone in who knows Unix[1] and have them provide proper
documentation as part of the setup.  This needs to include disaster
recovery documentation (DR) and the DR system needs to be tested.  Only
then can you be reasonably sure you'll minimise downtime in the event of a
real disaster.

A lot of the time small companies try to get away without employing a
Sysadmin (either contract or fulltime).  They see a Sysadmin as an
unneeded expense.  This is a form of false economy as any company that has
suffered serious downtime can attest.  A professional Sysadmin will bring
skills to the table that programmers won't necessarily have - and I don't
just mean technical skills.

A little bit of time and money spent now can save a whole lot next time
there is a problem.

A proper DR plan can have you up and running in a very short period of
time.  My company here in Canada (http://www.opentrend.net) typically
projects 72 hours[3] for a small business from the declaration of an
emergency[4].  We can do this through a combination of tested DR plans,
good offsite backups and a source of suitable hardware.  If necessary our
servers will host websites, etc.  The main thing is to be presented with
as few surprises as possible during the DR.

[1] This list is a good place to start looking for such a person or firm.

[2] And for this we can't go past Debian Stable IMHO.

[3] In reality it is often much quicker than this.

[4] This could mean the complete destruction of their business premises.

Rob

-- 
Robert Brockway B.Sc. email: robert at timetraveller.org, rbrockway at uqconnect.net
Linux counter project ID #16440 (http://counter.li.org)
"The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens" -Baha'u'llah