Scalix Forums

A few questions about Scalix server (comm or ent) which I couldnt find direct answers too:


Q; Tell me about the message storage .. how much of a PITA is it if I'm using a direct-file-copy disk to disk style backup, and userX deleted an important email and wants me to restore just that one email to thier inbox .. is this possible?

Q; Any plans for a (cross platform) thunderbird plugin simmilar to the evolution/outlook one? I'd like to give my linux and windows users the same desktop mail client and still take advantage of all the goodness beyond plain old imap4.

Q; Does the schedule/calendar module allow for "Me, and these three people reserving this conferance room on this date at this time" type functionality, and check the availibility of the other 3 people and the conferance room at that time?

Q; Does scalix server (through the evolution/outlook connectors) support non-ldap address books? All my users -HATE- the interface for ldap addy books in every client they have seen (especially outlook!) For example, the way t-bird handles local address books or the way outlook handles ms-exchange hosted address books?

Q; Can I install all the packages needed to run scalix server on a machine which has no X-Windows GUI? (Basically, if I can install it over an ssh session to a remote system...)

Q; If I'm using outlook or evolution (with connector) are calendar events going to annoy me with popups and such the way they do with local calendar events on those clients? (users want this stuff)

Q; Any plans to support Gentoo Linux?

Q; Any plans to support Solaris10/Sparc?


Thanks in advance! Scalix looks like a top-class server, and I'm looking forward to giving it a spin!

Some answers I can provide with my limited Scalix knowledge:

GenTimJS wrote:Q; Does the schedule/calendar module allow for "Me, and these three people reserving this conferance room on this date at this time" type functionality, and check the availibility of the other 3 people and the conferance room at that time?

Yes, Scalix supports free/busy lookups. You invite them and the resource and you see their availability on a timeline

GenTimJS wrote:Q; Does scalix server (through the evolution/outlook connectors) support non-ldap address books? All my users -HATE- the interface for ldap addy books in every client they have seen (especially outlook!) For example, the way t-bird handles local address books or the way outlook handles ms-exchange hosted address books?

It behaves just like the local address book in Outlook.

GenTimJS wrote:Q; Can I install all the packages needed to run scalix server on a machine which has no X-Windows GUI? (Basically, if I can install it over an ssh session to a remote system...)

Yes, since Scalix 10.

GenTimJS wrote:Q; If I'm using outlook or evolution (with connector) are calendar events going to annoy me with popups and such the way they do with local calendar events on those clients? (users want this stuff)

As for Outlook: yes, if the users set reminders on their calendar items. This also works with SWA, don't know about evolution, though. But if evolution does support this functionality, then yes.

GenTimJS wrote:Q; Any plans to support Gentoo Linux?

Don't know about their plans, but I've used OpenVZ to successfully set up a virtual host inside a Gentoo server using Centos that runs Gentoo just fine.

Thanks to mephisto.... :-) Few additional comments here:

Q; Tell me about the message storage .. how much of a PITA is it if I'm using a direct-file-copy disk to disk style backup, and userX deleted an important email and wants me to restore just that one email to thier inbox .. is this possible?

This is possible; however, as of Scalix 10 it is a manual procedure driven from the command line interface involving a number of steps and the system must be prepared for it (say: Single User Restore plus admin-driven single-item-copy!). We're working hard on providing more user-friendly interface in one of the next Scalix releases as numerous admins have approached us about this very topic. We listen. You might also want to check out SEP's website (www.sep.de) who provide a backup tool called Sesam that supports Scalix.

Q; Any plans for a (cross platform) thunderbird plugin simmilar to the evolution/outlook one? I'd like to give my linux and windows users the same desktop mail client and still take advantage of all the goodness beyond plain old imap4.

There are no concrete plans yet. Obviously the critical feature for this is calendaring support. Currently, there is no real calendar in the Thunderbird client - unlike Evolution where we provide the connector, though the actual Calendar is part of the client. The Mozilla guys have various projects running in that space, most notably the Sunbird and Lightning projects that try to provide the Mozilla calendar in a different form We're watching these efforts carefully and, depending how this develops, we might do something around those. I personally like Mozilla software and type most of my email in Thunderbird on the Mac; the cross-platform part is certainly one of their most appealing features. However, to position this as a more complete Outlook replacement in a Scalix environment, full calendar integration on their side is a must.

Q; Does scalix server (through the evolution/outlook connectors) support non-ldap address books? All my users -HATE- the interface for ldap addy books in every client they have seen (especially outlook!) For example, the way t-bird handles local address books or the way outlook handles ms-exchange hosted address books?

Actually, the functionality level provided is more like the Exchange Global Address List, not like a Local Addressbook. It's more powerful and convenient than plain LDAP, absolutely.

GenTimJS wrote:
Q; Can I install all the packages needed to run scalix server on a machine which has no X-Windows GUI? (Basically, if I can install it over an ssh session to a remote system...)
Yes, since Scalix 10.

Actually, a non-X install has been available in Scalix 9 as well, through some RPM-based manual install instructions. In 10, we've provided a non-graphical text-only interface to our integrated installer! :-)

Q; Any plans to support Gentoo Linux?

At this point there are no plans to support Gentoo.

Q; Any plans to support Solaris10/Sparc?

There are no plans to support Solaris on Sparc. On the danger sparking some serious SunFire here, looking at Sun's product strategy it seems that the Sparc CPU is phased out in the low to midrange server segment of their product line; based on our scaleability this is exactly the type of systems Scalix would require (A two CPU Opteron box supports up to 5000 concurrent Outlook users with relative ease). We believe that the Linux Intel/AMD platform provides the best price/performance ratio and therefore the best value for our customers, therefore it is what we currently focus on.

Hope this helps,
Florian

At this point there are no plans to support Gentoo.

Let me be a little more simplistic, are there plans to let someone using the CLI installer manually-override the dependancy and network checks? Sort of a "just trust me, ive got the deps and networking setup" option? This would allow for non-rpm based distros to use scalix with relativly little pain ...

There are no plans to support Solaris on Sparc. On the danger sparking some serious SunFire here, looking at Sun's product strategy it seems that the Sparc CPU is phased out in the low to midrange server segment of their product line; based on our scaleability this is exactly the type of systems Scalix would require (A two CPU Opteron box supports up to 5000 concurrent Outlook users with relative ease). We believe that the Linux Intel/AMD platform provides the best price/performance ratio and therefore the best value for our customers, therefore it is what we currently focus on.

Strange .. the T1000/T2000 seem very well suited for scalix .. as do the v100, v120, v210 and a few others. I suppose another valid question, tho I'm sure I know the answer, is "any plans to support linux on sparc" ?[/quote]

Sort of a "just trust me, ive got the deps and networking setup" option? This would allow for non-rpm based distros to use scalix with relativly little pain ...

Are you sure about that? I know the people who do the platform-specific QA and testing, i've looked at the code a little and I certainly look at the bug reports posted against Merlin (that's the internal engineering code name of the installer). There is tons of case-specific code in there between SuSE and RedHat (and even between the variuos versions of those we support), so it's hard for me to believe that just letting the syschecks go through would do any good.....

Strange .. the T1000/T2000 seem very well suited for scalix .. as do the v100, v120, v210 and a few others. I suppose another valid question, tho I'm sure I know the answer, is "any plans to support linux on sparc" ?

Put it in a different context - to support another platform is an initial investment of a high 5-digit number in USD or EUR, to keep it running and do testing, etc., for every new release is an ongoing effort that costs considerable money and resources. Now, given that unfortunately our resources are not unlimited (wow, that's dreamland), would you rather think we should do more platforms or more functiionality, especially given that the market segments you're talking about are rather small(ish). Honestly, it's simply a matter of business case - if we could ship 10000 units of Scalix on Solaris in year 1, we would certainly do that - however, none of the business data we have indicates anything like that.

Looking at your quote - with all the good features Scalix has, if you think it's right for you - would you not use it because it doesn't run on your favourite platform? :-)

Just for the fun of it - mini poll here... which of the following 5 platforms would you be most interested to run Scalix on...

1) Gentoo/i386
2) debian/PowerPC
3) debian/Sparc
4) Solaris/Intel
5) Solaris/Sparc
6) Mac OS/X

Cheers,
Florian.

Looking at your quote - with all the good features Scalix has, if you think it's right for you - would you not use it because it doesn't run on your favourite platform? :-)

Sadly, yes .. scalix not having an install method for Gentoo or Solaris is essentially the only reason my company hasnt gone with it .. we have a gentoo-based network (with a some Sun) and for us to add a suse/redhat server too it would complicate our security setup immensly. :-( Additionally, we have a far harder time pushing additional distros on managment than we do new software that the vendor at least gives us an install proceedure for, even if they dont offer "full support" so to speak.

so I guess my vote on the mini poll is "gentoo i386" ;-)

May I ask how many premium users your organisation would represent? believe that's at least a weighing factor on the poll. so far, interest for Gentoo has mostly come from "home" users, I believe you're the first organisation to refer to it.

curious - why would an intranet system be raising the kind of security concerns you're mentioning?

It's not so much about unwillingness to provide you with procedures - it's serious concerns about something that hasn't been tested, etc., and on which you would want to put some of your organisations most precious data on......

-- f.

Our company would be between 60 and 100 "premium" users, depending if managment wanted to tie in our international offices. Small, but not a mom and pop shop ;-) As our mail gateway however, any servers running it (potential of 3 servers in 3 locations) would have an IP on the public internet. We use a lot of custom security tools/configurations which sadly dont play nice on the major commercial distros. Additionally, as previously mentioned, introduction of "new technology" is a very difficult sell for us. Heh, I realise a linux distro really isnt "new technology" but I didnt claim it made sense ;-)

Where we currently are running a simplistic (in comparison) postfix+courier-imap+spamassassin+clamav setup, my guess is that we are in the minority of Scalix's "target market" in that we are looking for a leg-up on the unix/linux side, rather than a leg-over from the exchange side if that makes sense.

Last year at Linux world I spoke with JHF about some of these topics and she echoed your comments, that essentially I'm in the minority of the minority market ;-)

Well, I would agree to one of the minory reports. :-)

In Linux space, Gentoo is probably not one of the major distros (yet!); as in moving over from simple pop/imap email environments to "something better" and "more feature rich", you probably don't represent the majority yet - though I've just moved over a 1300 user shop in Germany that way, so it's certainly more than minimal.

Additonal remark on the security side - most people consider the data on their primary mail systems important enough not to directly expose the actual mail server on the internet. One usually puts another relay based on different technology in front. Could be Gentoo.! :-)

--f

We are currently running four Gentoo machines ourselves and I was at first hesitative about installing another distribution. As much as I like Gentoo I think that it is a problematic distribution to support. If you keep it up to date to get the latest security fixes, it is mostly unavoidable to install newer releases of certain packages. So it is in constant flux and keeping up to date with these changes would be a lot work for support.
I don't want to turn this into another distribution comparison thread, but there are other distros that seem much more logical to support than Gentoo (Debian and CentOS to mention two). Personally I don't think that CentOS will be supported soon, because I suspect that Scalix has some stong ties to Red Hat and they would disapprove.

There's a cost associated with supporting any platform. At the low end of the scale there's somethig like CentOS 4 which we don't support but I would be quite surprised if there were any bugs that CentOS 4 has that RHEL4 doesn't, at least as far as Scalix is concerned.

In the middle we have new distros like Debian and Gentoo. It takes a small number of weeks to get the compilation problems and installation problems ironed out. The biggest problem is the distro support: for RHEL and SLES we have Red Hat and Novell providing support, for Debian we have the likes of Ubuntu and Xandros. We basically need to be able to say where we got our build and test environment from and a source of ixes so we can keep up to date.

Also in the middle is support for new hardware, same OS. Mostly anyway. Getting Scalix to run on Itanium would be a lot of work, getting it running on ppc would be relatively easy.

At the high end though -- and we're talking seriously expensive -- is getting Scalix working on a different OS. I looked briefly at FreeBSD and it's not as easy as you might think. Solaris and MacOS X are similarly difficult. Florian's estimates are in the right ball park: but as a customer prepared to stump up that kind of money to buy a port you have to ask yourself if it wouldn't be cheaper to go for an already supported platform.

jch

for the poll: debian :)

Please: debian/i386 !

Or a detailed documentation of requirements / manual installation steps for experienced admins. ;-)

I vote for Gentoo, this distribution is gaining people every hour. Actually i have more than 20 servers under gentoo and i am thinking on trying Scalix anyways. I will try to make it work, but if there is 'official' support for that plataform would be really really great.
In our enterprise could be at least 100 premium users, we are a small e-commerce company but it is growing really fast so, the amount of premium users is not certain.


Regards from Argentina,
Santiago del Castillo

Debian seems a great choice, isn't it? You can search the net, read comparison, it has reputation of stability, security and maturity, with a great package tool, apt-get, all apect to get a good, and before all, a robust server. And isn't that we need as administrator? ANd it's free.
Gentoo isn't as mature and robust... good but more for fun?
Redhat isn't free, nearly as expensive as windows...

Won't you really consider debian?