Troubleshooting Scalix issues

[ScalixSupport]

As you've probably noticed, activity in the forum has increased since the announcement of the Scalix 10 release. That's great news for us but we need your assistance in targetting our responses back to any questions you post.

We need you to post as much detail in your questions as you can.

• Chapter 20 of the Administration Guide ( which is included in the installation media under the documentation/ directory ) gives a lot of information as to what debugging options are available. This includes logging for the server and for SAC and SWA through tomcat.
• Make use of the knowledgebase at http://www.scalix.com/support/knowledgebase.html. There are a number of technotes and also copies of the documentation. Note that the Solutions tab in the knowledgebase is separately searchable.
• This forum also has a search facility. We try not to post the same information multiple times so we may direct you to an existing post.
• From time to time, we'll post a sticky note at the top of the appropriate forum. Again, take the time to read through the information that's posted.
• When posting questions to the forum, a list of the tasks that you've already done is more helpful to us than a "it doesn't work" message.
• Where possible, post the complete picture, for example SWA is IMAP-based so, if you have an SWA question, look at the IMAP server logs as well as the tomcat logs.
• Similarly, please post more than one line of an error log, we like to be able to see context around the error.

Cheers

Dave

[sonoracomm]

I realize this is an old post, but...

The new Admin Guide doesn't have a Chapter 20 and debugging info is hard to find.

Just a bump...

G

[alephnul]

And it is no longer included in the distribution. The documents folder now has a single text file with the addresses of the forum, the wiki, and the documentation section of the website.

[florian]

which we did in purpose so that it's easier for us to keep the documentation up to date.

Florian.

[Trevor Benson]

Not that its not simple to find for most of us, but can someone edit the sticky to have the correct knoweldgebase link for those who dont know where to find it?

http://www.scalix.com/knowledgebase


Thanks,
Trevor

[jhamill]

Not that its not simple to find for most of us, but can someone edit the sticky to have the correct knoweldgebase link for those who dont know where to find it?

http://www.scalix.com/knowledgebase


Thanks,
Trevor

I have to agree with this. I find the knowledgebase doesn't generally answer questions I have and the forum generally is the quickest way to find any solution as somebody is bound to have had an issue and hopefullly had it solved.

However I wish you could improve the search capabilities of the forum as it generally returns too much information, especially the default search which seems to return a match for any word in the search.

[William]

quoted searches like "read only" really can only be done via google.

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.scalix.com%2Fforums%2F+%22read+only%22

some other searches do not work:
searching forums for read-only turns up no results
but this post does contain the keyword.
http://www.scalix.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=35486

[joako]

How come the "knowlege base" is 100% blank and empty? Is this some sick joke as to the poor state of the Scalix documentation?

[mikethebike]

joako,

thats strange, when I look in the wiki and the tech documentation there is a huge amount of info in there.
Please bear in mind this is a forum, and many of the contributors offer their assistance free of charge, when they have the opportunity to log in. We do not run Scalix in house, but like to keep abreast of what is going on, it still semes to me to offer a very good solution and if you have the skills you can do some funky things under the hood that other GUI based mail systems do not allow.
Flaming a product and the contributors on a forum is not the way to get your problems answered

Mick

[William]

I think almost certainly that Scalix have ceased utilising that KB system and it is intentionally empty, perhaps now just using the Scalix website, Wiki, Forums and Bugtracker as publically available information sources re Scalix.

[joako]

Well I try to read on "troubleshooting scalix" issues and the information is wrong... how am I supposed to know that? The knowledgebase IS empty and quite frankly there is not much info in the wiki.

[RSisco]

You are trying to find free support for a commercial product, you have to take what you can get. Even though Scalix employees try to help us all out in the forums (in their personal time I believe), support for some issues can only be achieved through a trouble ticket. I think that we all have a pretty good thing going here, since Scalix continues to provide a free version of their commercial product as well a level of free support and even the fact that they host this forum. If you need support that you cannot find on your own, it may be time to pay for it. For the most part, others in this forum understand that. Some even go as far as to post what Scalix support did for them to help others in the future. As with any software though, some problems are going to be unique to an individual installation, leaving that admin to either solve it on their own, or seek out other methods of support. We all try to help with what we can. I feel that being polite and appreciative of other people's time tends to yield more positive results.

Like most others, I love a challenge and enjoy helping others try to solve their problems; but I am still limited to what I know and have experienced as well as only being able to use what time is available to me. I'm sure this is a common theme here.

Richard

[joako]

Yes and what is avaible here is a a total lack of documentation. A good commercial product should not require any paid support because the documentation will allow a competant systems administrator to manage the system and fix any issues. Every error should be documented. I think Scalix/Xandros have an interest in not providing any advanced documentation, and that seems to be the reality of the situation. Why provide documentation for free when you can sell a support contract? If you look up there was better documentation from HP OpenMail and Samsung Contact, however I can not seem to locate those any more.

[William]

here is a little bit of documentation I use:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7856668/scalix/scalix_man_pages.zip
"A collection of converted man pages to html. Also a PDF version. From server version: 11.0.3.31"

[edit]
Wiki hows tos updated with above link:
http://www.scalix.com/wiki/index.php?title=HowTos/Convert_Man_Pages

[les]

Yes and what is avaible here is a a total lack of documentation. A good commercial product should not require any paid support because the documentation will allow a competant systems administrator to manage the system and fix any issues. Every error should be documented. I think Scalix/Xandros have an interest in not providing any advanced documentation, and that seems to be the reality of the situation. Why provide documentation for free when you can sell a support contract? If you look up there was better documentation from HP OpenMail and Samsung Contact, however I can not seem to locate those any more.

What do you really want here? Do you want a document showing every error and fix found for a Scalix problem across thousands of users and systems? Does every error that pops up have the same solution for every user/situation? If some outlook based problems are caused by 3rd party addons (not scalix of Microsoft) do these need to be documented by Scalix aswell?
Does Microsoft have this level of documentation with there systems? Do you find answers to all Microsoft problems in their documentation? Maybe they should fall into the "not a good commercial product" category because their documentation does not cover every single error you are likely to get on their systems. I wonder if you flame Microsoft as much on Microsoft based forums when you have a problem thats not documented.

People here, offer their help for free, in their own time. Probably 95%+ of posts nowadays come from Users, not Scalix employees. Some problems have been seen before and solutions can be found, for free. Others require Scalix to look into it and that means paid support.