Linux mail server, Blackberry Enterprise Server, GMV Atlas - few questions

@SYNACK

I agree/disagree. I've used BES and one thing I can relate to is the logs. They are rubbish. However, it does what it's supposed to. Works nicely and like with every product there are good/bad points.

Support I've had has been extremly good. Not sure on your experience. When I call RIM, I get an anser straight away.

Another option to use Exch is you can use EAS (active-synch) which is covered by your CAL. There's a pluggin for so that BB can use it too. No need for any addtional infrastructure.

S

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Originally Posted by GrumbleDook

A *BIG* warning about using random external servers to pick up emails from your in-house server to allow access to personal devices ... you then have *NO* control over the email, the contents and where it may go.

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I'd assume the external server is your own, and was using a secure method to obtain emails from the one inside the firewall. You're right, though, it would probably be a mistake to export your internal email to Google's servers - your email should stay under your control.

Equally, it would be a mistake to assume that anything behind your firewall is safe and not properly secure servers - many schools have little protection against people plugging in whatever devices they can sneak in and running port scanners or similar.

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Originally Posted by sukh

@SYNACK

I agree/disagree. I've used BES and one thing I can relate to is the logs. They are rubbish. However, it does what it's supposed to. Works nicely and like with every product there are good/bad points.

Support I've had has been extremly good. Not sure on your experience. When I call RIM, I get an anser straight away.

Another option to use Exch is you can use EAS (active-synch) which is covered by your CAL. There's a pluggin for so that BB can use it too. No need for any addtional infrastructure.

S

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Thanks @sukh Good to hear that it can work, I have had my fill of BES though and would need to be medicated heavily to even consider going near it again. It is possibly one of the worst things that I have ever dealt with in IT and I would put it right up there with SBS 2003 on the list of worst products in existance. As to support I don't think that they even know NZ exists, they can't find a 100 year old street on their address verification system. I can only hope that other solutions continue to crush it out of existance at the current rate so that I never have the misfortune of encountering it again.

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Originally Posted by sukh

2010 offer redundacny at the database level and hardware level.

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Simple mirroring failover (your mail server hardware conks out, another takes over) should be handled by your virtualisation solution. For larger installations, I imagine mySQL has a mirroring / load balancing solution. I seem to remember my home email server being file system based, so I guess that would just use a distributed file system for storage.

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There's a big performance improvement from 2003, in terms on IOPS

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Sorry, meant comparing Exchange (any version) with other email servers.

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You have transport rules which can be implemented

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Would Sendmail or similar use some kind of post-processing script or regular expression to do the same thing?

+1 - When you using BES, it's secure all the way up to your BES router, from here, the next hop os the BES NOC, which again is secure. Then to your device.

Also, you do have control, what control dont you have, if you dont, then I'd choose the appropiate 3rd party.
Sukh

@david

If we're talking just about Exchange then we have HA here, if we bring virtualisation into this, then we're looking at something completly different.

If you have virtualisation deployed then yes, this can work, however if you dont then this brings in extra costs. Also, normal virtualisation (depends on what vendor you are using),you have to buy additional licenses to activate or use this feature. Even then, you will need some sort of replication between the two hosts, if using a SAN, then you will need further software, and possibly a license to use replications.

Even comparing Exch with other servers, I have just mentioed a few things here. The amount of users on an Exchange platform has to be a reason why it's chosen. Even live@edu which I see many schools are using runs off Exchange.

I'm not too sure how Send mail, cant comment. But you can use regular expressions with Exch.

@dhicks - You can do most things that you can do with exchange using free software, you just need to use a lot of it. Exchange is all in one nice bundle proven and designed to work right together under one unified system with one config and one standard. To accomplish even part of this functionality you would need to couple sendmail with a backend DB, this with the ability to be block mirrored to another server and to another drive on the same server. You would need calanders from another bit of software, contacts and tasks storage along with a system to process mailbox rules at the server all linked back into the databases. You would also need a system to seurely mirror just logon details and password hashes to and external database that could run on a different system in a DMZ. This is not even touching on the autocomplete functions, the very competent webmail which is a massive improvement from 2003. You would also need to look to add in a whole Astrix phone system backend to handle voice messages, voice recognition to transcribe voicemail and text to speech to read them out. Add in Activesync support which you would need to liscence and you have a massive pile of free software tacked together in all sorts of ways making it unsuportable by anyone but its creator and probably a nightmare to troubleshoot.

There are solutions that do provide a good subset of these features but in general even though they are based on free software some of the nice aditional features like the far superior (in comparision to IMAP and POP3) Activsync protocol are only in the pay for versions.

Still using Atlas and IMAP, the software is looking more promising - though it's struggling a bit with the idle capability (which is listed as a capability of IMAP on that port). If I can get past this, I may get somewhere!

Seems that idle isn't working properly - it can enter the idle state using telnet, but doesn't receive the done call when a new message arrives. Not sure why yet.

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Originally Posted by 3s-gtech

Seems that idle isn't working properly - it can enter the idle state using telnet, but doesn't receive the done call when a new message arrives. Not sure why yet.

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One of the steps of the Atlas installer can help you because it checks the configuration of SMTP, IMAP and Administrator data account according to the data inserted during the setup process (this step is named Registration and verification), there you can see the checklist results for the IMAP, SMTP and IDLE.

There are some logs that may be useful under C:\Program Files\GMV\Atlas\Logs\aaaammdd_Atlas\YOURMACHINE_RE VXXXX_AtlasSetup_PIDXXXX_main.log, there is also a forum for technical questions in Atlas GMV web site