Few questions from prospective client

[sam.sen]

I run a private K-12 school with a little more than 300 students. We have 80 faculty/staff and about 3/4 of our students use email (Grades K-3 do not). We're currently running postfix w/ Squirrelmail on the frontend (ALL on FreeBSD). Users with a dedicated workstation (12 users) use Outlook, while the rest use webmail. The setup has been great thus far, but I'm looking for other alternatives, as it is cumbersome to manage users on two separate systems (one AD and one Unix). Truthfully, I've been searching for a webmail client that mimicks Outlook. Squirrelmail isn't cutting it and it's acting up big time within the past 6 months and users are getting annoyed. I'm looking at Scalix as a possible alternative. So, I have a few questions.

1 - It seems the Community edition is all we need. In regards to backup, how can I handle that? What I do now is rsync the /home directory to a separate server. Emails are placed in the user's home directory inside "Maildir." Would I just need to write a script to shutdown Scalix temporarily while rsync is being run?

2 - Fedora is such a major turn off for me but if I had to run it, then I will try. I am a big fan of CentOS, but I havent seen if anyone has been successful in installin Scalix on CentOS. besides, aren't they close to being the same thing?

3 - What's the 25 enterprise users for? My users do not need to share calendars or anything.

4 - My server is an Athlon XP+ 2800 w/ 1GB of RAM. Hard drive is an IDE 80GB. Is this enough to run Scalix?

[ScalixSupport]

1 - It seems the Community edition is all we need. In regards to backup, how can I handle that? What I do now is rsync the /home directory to a separate server. Emails are placed in the user's home directory inside "Maildir." Would I just need to write a script to shutdown Scalix temporarily while rsync is being run?

2 - Fedora is such a major turn off for me but if I had to run it, then I will try. I am a big fan of CentOS, but I havent seen if anyone has been successful in installin Scalix on CentOS. besides, aren't they close to being the same thing?

3 - What's the 25 enterprise users for? My users do not need to share calendars or anything.

4 - My server is an Athlon XP+ 2800 w/ 1GB of RAM. Hard drive is an IDE 80GB. Is this enough to run Scalix?

1. Scalix does not store its mail in mbox format and messages are not stored on a per-user basis because inbox messages can be shared between users. We have documents in our knowledgebase at http://www.scalix.com/support/knowledgebase.html that discuss backups.

2. There are posts in these forums that detail other people's successful attempts to install on CentOS. The official line is that Scalix does not support these installations.

3. Apart from calendaring, the 25 enterprise users are able to use Outlook and access Public Folders.

4. There's no reason why the server shouldn't be able to handle the number of users. More memory is obviously a bonus and you should consider an extra disk to hold the message store. As I/O is important to a mailserver, make sure that the disk is running at optimal settings. I know that some Dell hardware doesn't enable the IDE controller to be at it's maximum throughput so it needs to be changed in the BIOS. Not sure that this applies directly to you but it's worth checking.

Cheers

Dave

[sam.sen]

1. Scalix does not store its mail in mbox format and messages are not stored on a per-user basis because inbox messages can be shared between users. We have documents in our knowledgebase at http://www.scalix.com/support/knowledgebase.html that discuss backups.

2. There are posts in these forums that detail other people's successful attempts to install on CentOS. The official line is that Scalix does not support these installations.

3. Apart from calendaring, the 25 enterprise users are able to use Outlook and access Public Folders.

4. There's no reason why the server shouldn't be able to handle the number of users. More memory is obviously a bonus and you should consider an extra disk to hold the message store. As I/O is important to a mailserver, make sure that the disk is running at optimal settings. I know that some Dell hardware doesn't enable the IDE controller to be at it's maximum throughput so it needs to be changed in the BIOS. Not sure that this applies directly to you but it's worth checking.

Cheers

Dave

Thanks for the quick response. Regarding the "enterprise users," does that mean only 25 users can use Outlook? They would just need to access their email via IMAP, nothing more. NO public folders or anything like that.

[ScalixSupport]

Thanks for the quick response. Regarding the "enterprise users," does that mean only 25 users can use Outlook? They would just need to access their email via IMAP, nothing more. NO public folders or anything like that.

Only the 25 Enterprise users can use Outlook in (what used to be called) corporate mode. If you use Outlook for POP3 or IMAP access, you will be OK.

If you don't want any of the features that the Enterprise users have, that's fine, you can still use Community Edition.

Cheers

Dave

[sam.sen]

The knowledge is VERY slow for me at the moment.
In general, can the /var/opt (it seems this is where ALL scalix files are being installed) be rsynced to another server?

[jch]

A good backup strategy is to use rsync to create incrmental backups. You probably know this but the --link-dest option allows you to do this. I must set this up at home one day, but omsuspend to stop activity on the server and then rsync with the usual backup options and --link-dest is your friend. Oh yes, and a snapshot volume to make the copy from. There's more detail in the knowledge base and, as usual, google is your friend (eg http://www.google.com/search?q=rsync+link+dest).

jch

[kanderson]

I posted a few weeks ago with a (hideous) script that actually works pretty well at creating backups.

Basically, it shuts down RCI, so nobody can connect.
Then it uses omcpoutu to copy out each persons email into a single file.
Then it restarts RCI so people can connect again.

I like it because I can just create a restore mailnode, and restore an individual user easily and quickly, yet seperately from their real mailbox. The user can just export the email they need, or even send it to themselves again, if that's appropriate.

The only downside is if I'm lazy and just quickly import a user, and they ask me to leave it there for a few days, they end up with a second entry in the addressbook. Which is irritating.