default server name (when setting up outlook with connector)

[William]

Hi,

Every time I set a user up in Outlook to use Scalix I am presented with this page after clicking the Advanced button.



mail is the name of our server.
Where would I need to add information to get this default to change to mail.ourdomain.com?

Many Thanks,

William.

[florian]

you will just need to setup an alias called scalix-default-mail in your DNS (CNAME record) to point to your actual mailserver.

Cheers,
Florian.

[jedwards]

This needs to be changed. People shouldn't need to set up a DNS entry just to accommodate this programming mistake.

[florian]

Could you explain that last comment a bit further? I don't really see a "programming mistake" here....

The alternative would be to setup a "default" scalix host on a per-machine basis otherwise, i.e. during installation of Scalix Connect or through a control panel or registry setting. The information could hardly be stored on the Scalix server as there is no connection to the Scalix server at this time.

A centralized directory service such as DNS seems to be the correct solution for this. If you want to do it locally, btw., you can also put the alias into your Windows "hosts" file.

From a technical point of view, the only other thing I could see is some "broadcast" technology, in which the Scalix Server announces itself on the network through a Bonjour-Zeroconf-type technologies. This is something I would generally like to avoid as it pollutes the network and doesn't work properly in non-broadcast environments anyway.

Thoughts?
Florian.

[William]

I am with jedwards on this one.
Your advice is either incorrect/misguided or the system is incorrectly written.

We do not have a DNS server in house.

[jch]

We do not have a DNS server in house.

It really is very difficult to write a working mail server when you don't have a working DNS. Intenet mail critically depends on the DNS and there's no getting round it.

I appreciate that for very small installations you may be able to get away with not having a DNS most of the time, but it really is very very easy to configure a small DNS server.

I should add, I suppose, that it would be very difficult to do server testing with a non-DNS environment because too many tests depend on the DNS working properly and we'd have to re-engineer the test network as well as those (automated) tests to, well, basically, attempt to make the mail server work in a crippled environment.

jch

[Kris]

I agree with Florian that using DNS is the best way for doing this.. I just wish I thought of this before finishing e-mail migration.. I typed in the right servername so many times..

[florian]

William, Jedwards,

I'm still trying to understand what alternative you propose? Client needs to find the server someway and DNS seems to be the easiest-to-administer solution. If you don't have a DNS in house, you can certainly use the hosts-file approach, because I assume that if you don't have any server for your local network, you will have a very small number of workstations.

If you do, any machine running Windows 2000, 2003 or NT server will do as a DNS box - and any Linux machine will as well, including the Scalix server. The setup will not take you more than an hour, given a proper howto, and you'll gain a number of other significant advantages going forward.

... wondering ....

Florian.

[Kris]

Perhaps an option to generate an installer with the correct servername?

I don't see any other ways besides the current DNS solution.. using broadcasts is indeed very ugly (and won't even work in many situations).

[William]

florian:

The information could hardly be stored on the Scalix server as there is no connection to the Scalix server at this time.

Hi Florian,

Upon re-reading your posts I see that you are completely correct. I was thinking that it was misconfigured and using our hostname (mail) somehow with Scalix-default prepended to it.

No progamming mistake there, advice was correct.

DNS server or hosts file - both good options to consider.

Thank you.

William.

[grahamk]

What about being able to add default values to a *.ini file, and call the install file with the ini file as an arguement? I havent explored automated installs much, but I think that sxpro.exe supports this type of procedure?

[florian]

correct, sxpro.exe can be used for scripted profile generation including specification of the hostname. it is documented in the client deployment guide.

Florian.

[btisdall]

Also consider that having some sort of DNS will make your life easier in many other ways though.

I always use DNSmasq if a full BIND installation is unwarranted & can't recommend it highly enough.

It has a built in DHCP server & essentially serves information based on the leases it issues, entries in /etc/hosts from the machine on which it resides & info from your upstream (e.g. ISP) DNS servers, which it caches. You can also add MX records etc using its config file.

It's easily available on RH/Fedora, Debian/Ubuntu & I daresay SUSE too.

http://www.thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/doc.html

[jedwards]

Wow. Didn't mean to start an arguement. We put the connector software on the production server. Then we go around and set up Outlook and the connector. If we could put an entry in one file that lived on the production server with the installer files, just like the ini idea, that field would already be filled in to the real name of the server, of which exists a DNS entry. It just gets old after a few hundred times. So the programming error I made was based on these presuppositions. My apology is extended. Perhaps this function already exists and I missed it.