Compatibility with a Plesk 8.0 FC4 system?

[Roshan]

Hi,

I currently have a root server, which came pre-installed with FC4 and Plesk. I find Plesk very useful, as I can give my friends Plesk client accounts, and they can use it to easily manage their domains hosted on this machine. Plesk works together with customized versions of qmail and courier-imap.

The questions I have now are:

* How easy would it be to install Scalix on this system? Could I do a manual-install of Scalix, as I think the Scalix installers probably would clobber Plesk.
* Could I configure Scalix to work in a dual-MTA configuration, so that the Plesk configured mailing-lists and aliases would still work?
* Could Scalix use the mail user configuration managed by Plesk (written to a MySQL database), to maintain its own user database?

I've just installed Scalix into a VMWare machine and have been playing around on a bare FC4 machine, and love the features it provides. It would be great to install this onto my real server, so my friends can take advantage of this for their real mail too.

Would appreciate any input.

Congrats on a great product!

[jleq]

Hello,

I tried for a few weeks to set up exactly what you are talking about on my personal web server (FC4, Plesk 8). It wasn't successful. I would say that your safest bet is to use VMWare, Xen, or some other virtualization software in order to run Scalix, if you don't want to destroy your other mail servers.

To answer your questions:
1) Not very hard at all, standard installation applies (assuming you shut down your other mailservers, make sure you update /etc/hosts too)
2) I failed miserably at this. I wouldn't try it unless you have a good bit of linux mailserver configuration experience (and if you figure it out, please let me know how you did it!)
3) Not without a custom script to dump the mail information from Plesk's MySQL database into the Scalix LDAP server. You could probably write one in PHP and have it run as a cron job to sync the databases.

I'm assuming that you, like me, are mainly interested in the Scalix Web Access component. There are plenty of other AJAX webmail clients available (roundcube, @mail, etc), although they aren't as nice as Scalix.

I still recommend Scalix for enterprise mail purposes, but it just isn't designed to be used on a shared web/mail server. Nobody uses Exchange or Groupwise in a shared hosting situation. Scalix is in that class of mail server... quite different from exim/qmail/postfix/whatever combination. If I were you, I would stick with whatever server Plesk chose to install.

John

[Roshan]

I've been investigating this further, and think that using CE Raw is probably the best option. I'd have a much finer overview of what each individual RPM tries to do, and could probably massage things along. The server I want to install this on is shared with several other friends of mine, and they're also quite keen to be able to use Scalix, so I don't really care about destroying my Plesk mail accounts. :)

I have also been thinking about your idea of using virtualization software, and agree that it would probably be the safest way of doing this, but would then have the additional disk and CPU overhead (admittedly, CPU overhead might be quite low) of the virtual machine.

I've seen that Plesk can have 'trigger' scripts installed. I think using such a trigger script to keep the Scalix LDAP updated seems to be a good idea. I also saw a post on the forums on how to integrate Scalix with Postfix, and think that info would help on having Scalix work with the default Plesk qmail.

As you said, I'm very interested in the Scalix Web Access component, but not only. This setup would also make address and appointment information from my Palm T|X available for me to edit online.

I'll investigate further, and shall update on progress. :wink:

Roshan

[tercioglu]

any progress Roshan?

did you have any success with the raw package?

I am in a very similar position to yours I have a colocated server with plesk and want to install scalix.