Is anybody home at Scalix?

[kanderson]

I should say too, I'm somewhat surprised that you had crappy service historically. The support team is why I initially became involved with Scalix. My service has always been nothing short of stellar.

Just in the past 2 weeks, I assisted a company that had lost a substantial number of files on their server due to what appears to be a filesystem error. They had no backups in the since Feb. I worked with Scalix support almost literally around the clock, and we managed to recover all of the users mail, in spite of having no backups. Thanks to Dug and Stefan.

Scalix's support team is the best I've ever encountered, and I've been doing this for more than 20 years.

Kev.

[jaime.pinto]

Kev

I'd be more than happy to post my testimony regarding our most recent support experience under the new arrangement, basically because I'm very happy with it.

Previously we're getting our support through a local dealer. In fact, that was our primary determinant on choosing Scalix over some of their competitors: we felt more comfortable knowing that somebody close-by could come in person to put out some fires, should we need. They were great in the beginning, but went through from growing pains, and lately our impression was that the relationship Scalix/dealer was not as well oiled, and at times it felt like they were passing the ball to each other. At the end of the day we were left in a vacuum, in particular in the weeks following the acquisition, since they stopped being a Scalx dealer.

Last week we planned to do a somewhat complex "diagonal" upgrade, ie, move the installation to a better hardware, upgrade the OS from RHEL4 to RHEL5 (new raid, snapshot, etc) as well as v11.0.4 to v11.1.0. As it turned out, the first attempt we've made ourselves didn't go as smooth. I emailed Florian directly that evening asking for help, and for suggestions on a Canadian dealer that we could work with moving forwards.

The very next morning Florian (from Germany) arranged a conference call with Rich Pfister (in NYC)- who now runs NA sales, basically having taken Jim Barton's role. We quickly worked out the details, and that afternoon we had a contact in Canada as a potential new dealer - Kevin Anderson from Digital Adrenaline. Kev (from the West Coast) was extremely helpful, knowledgeable and quick on resolution. With his leadership, in about 2 hours that evening we had a brand new server, fully migrated and operational.

I must say that as a team they showed genuine concern with our situation, were very accommodating with our schedule and very accurate on identifying the issues we had and fixing them. I admit being still skeptical about the Scalix/Xandros partnership early last week, and even more so about the distance. That has been all put to rest now. We asked Kev and Digital Adrenaline to formalize a support contract and send us the proposal.

Thanks Kevin, Florian and Rich
Keep up the good work and good luck in the restructure.

[kanderson]

Congrats on the new look!

Welcome to the club.

Kev.

[jaime.pinto]

Hey, I look like a Scalix General now! What does that mean? Can I still speak my mind? Should I watch my language now? I promise I won't go beyond calling ActiveSync stupid or MS crap!
Kidding a part, thanks for the recognition (not to my previous nice post to scalix). I hope my participation continues to be of some help and information to the community. This forum certainly has been instrumental to me and to our users. Lets keep it alive and vibrant!

[kanderson]

You can still speak your mind. We all do. As you now see, this isn't a sign of anything except some recognition that Scalix is thankful for you participation in the community here. You deserve it. You've been as helpful as possible for as long as I remember. Most of you constructive criticism has been valid, and helped to light fires under people's butts.

Just one word of warning. Your comments will carry more weight now, so expect to see LOTS more private messages asking for help. Also just keep that in mind when you do post. But also know that the new logo will work retroactively for your old posts. Some of which were quite blunt. So do still speak your mind. We all benefit.

Welcome aboard.
Kev.

[Mon1018]

My hope is that Xandros as a company will use Scalix. I think there would probably be far fewer bugs if this were to happen.

my words, too

[florian]

No reason for hope - Xandros has been using Scalix internally since May 2006, when they launched Xandros Server 1.0 which included an OEM version of Scalix. Of course, Scalix has been using our own products since forever and actually we usually run some development-level code on at least some of our production servers. We absolutely eat our own dogfood.

Florian.

[kanderson]

Most of the partners too, throw on the newest code on their own servers as fast as possible, and then wait for a while before rolling it out to their clients. That's certainly how we operate.

Kev.

[netcomrade]

We have an inodes issue on a file system
We have a Scalix 'mailstore' that's about 10 times bigger that our combined mailboxes
We have a product that we moved to a different server, but wait, we couldn't change the name of it
We lack groups visibility the GUI, and re-creating them didn't bring them back to the GUI
We have people with OutLook that after the last upgrade (11.0.4) are starting to complain about slowness again
We have webmail that's still slow (please explain to me why it takes mins to load some msg headers).. we did make it faster by turning some swa parameter off

And lastly.. we have faxed our form for support last Friday, which stated we'll hear from someone within 12hours.. and I have spoked to a Xandros rep about new support options, and never got a call from any salesman (I guess Scalix doesn't even enough ppl to sell either)

I have stuck by Scalix, while everyone hated it since the install (that pop mail was just so much faster), but my patience is running out.

[florian]

We have an inodes issue on a file system

What exactly do you mean? What does this have to do with Scalix (sounds like OS issue)?

We have a Scalix 'mailstore' that's about 10 times bigger that our combined mailboxes

Are you running omscan to verify/fix the reported mailstore size and/or to cleanup leftover orphans?

We have a product that we moved to a different server, but wait, we couldn't change the name of it

Correct - same is true of 9/10 client server products including things such as SAP, Oracle, etc. Please see http://www.scalix.com/wiki/index.php?ti ... ChangeFQDN for instructions.

We lack groups visibility the GUI, and re-creating them didn't bring them back to the GUI

Are these internally or externally managed? It might have to do with the Hostname change, but that would need to be checked.

We have people with OutLook that after the last upgrade (11.0.4) are starting to complain about slowness again

The current release is 11.2. Please explain what operations are affected by that "slowness".

We have webmail that's still slow (please explain to me why it takes mins to load some msg headers).. we did make it faster by turning some swa parameter off

Well, for me it loads 27000 message headers in my inbox in about 2 minutes while I am connected from Europe; during that time I can already work with the client which I find very acceptable. How long does it exactly take for you at what point? What hardware and over what network are you running this on?

And lastly.. we have faxed our form for support last Friday, which stated we'll hear from someone within 12hours.. and I have spoked to a Xandros rep about new support options, and never got a call from any salesman (I guess Scalix doesn't even enough ppl to sell either)

Please shoot me an email or a PM with your details and I will find out why this wasn't followed up as it should have been. That's truly embarassing and we should find out what happened.

I have stuck by Scalix, while everyone hated it since the install (that pop mail was just so much faster), but my patience is running out.

Well, pop mail will allways be so much faster given that it's local access vs. a client/server system. The rest seems to be dependent on some of the above and before we understand what's going on, there is hardly a way to fix it.

Looking forward to your response,
Florian.

[netcomrade]

We have an inodes issue on a file system

What exactly do you mean? What does this have to do with Scalix (sounds like OS issue)?

The install documents should talk about this as a potential issue. In addiition, reserFS is not really supported by redhat. Our company is really not that large (30 mailboxes)

We have a Scalix 'mailstore' that's about 10 times bigger that our combined mailboxes

Are you running omscan to verify/fix the reported mailstore size and/or to cleanup leftover orphans?

The omscan stuff sits in crontab.. additionally from our 'scalix admin':

omoff -d 0 omscan (shutdown omscan)
omscan -Z (reset omscan counters)
omon omscan (restart omscan)
omscan -Aavfx (run omscan in active mode to check and fix any issues it can find) - it didn't clear orphans
omtidyallu -Twr -a 0 -d -k (purge everyones trash and recovery directory)
sxdu -hs (show actual mailbox space usage)

cleared orphans directory
cleaned stuff in tmp directory
rebooted server (actually, this was necessary, otherwise scalix wouldn't come up)

We have a product that we moved to a different server, but wait, we couldn't change the name of it

Correct - same is true of 9/10 client server products including things such as SAP, Oracle, etc. Please see http://www.scalix.com/wiki/index.php?ti ... ChangeFQDN for instructions.

Oh, common.. could've stored the name in one place.

And this is so not true for Oracle Database Server. Oracle has notes on how to deal with it, w/o comments like And remember, what you just did was a bad idea.

We lack groups visibility the GUI, and re-creating them didn't bring them back to the GUI

Are these internally or externally managed? It might have to do with the Hostname change, but that would need to be checked.

I don't know what 'externally managed' means.. they were all created through scalix

We have people with OutLook that after the last upgrade (11.0.4) are starting to complain about slowness again

The current release is 11.2. Please explain what operations are affected by that "slowness".

Switching between messages w/o attachment (lately)
Switching between folders has never been fast
I am not jumping to 11.2, last time we jumped to 11.0.1 we had a lot of grief for about 3 month until 11.0.4 came out.

We have webmail that's still slow (please explain to me why it takes mins to load some msg headers).. we did make it faster by turning some swa parameter off

Well, for me it loads 27000 message headers in my inbox in about 2 minutes while I am connected from Europe; during that time I can already work with the client which I find very acceptable. How long does it exactly take for you at what point? What hardware and over what network are you running this on?

Takes about 40secs to load by inbox of <30 msgs. Download 1011 headers in the first 120seconds for a folder of 10K messages. The hardware is sufficient. With the initial install we learned that this app is disk hungry (with proper indexing it shouldn't be), and it's not on a RAID1 doing about 50-60megs per second. The box is a 4CPU Dell 2650. All of the people that (attempt to) use it are either on DSL or Cable Modem or FIOS.

And lastly.. we have faxed our form for support last Friday, which stated we'll hear from someone within 12hours.. and I have spoked to a Xandros rep about new support options, and never got a call from any salesman (I guess Scalix doesn't even enough ppl to sell either)

Please shoot me an email or a PM with your details and I will find out why this wasn't followed up as it should have been. That's truly embarassing and we should find out what happened.

did

I have stuck by Scalix, while everyone hated it since the install (that pop mail was just so much faster), but my patience is running out.

Well, pop mail will allways be so much faster given that it's local access vs. a client/server system. The rest seems to be dependent on some of the above and before we understand what's going on, there is hardly a way to fix it.

Looking forward to your response,
Florian.

[b]
I never had any complaints with IMAP on exchange either.

[florian]

The install documents should talk about this as a potential issue. In addiition, reserFS is not really supported by redhat. Our company is really not that large (30 mailboxes)

So again - did you run out of inodes or what exactly happened? We haven't seen any issues with this for a while, so I'd like to be sure.

The omscan stuff sits in crontab.. additionally from our 'scalix admin': ...

One important one is missing, omscan -avfx - this would fix issues that the last server cycle found, including cleaning up orphans. I assume those are responsible for some of your diskspace usage. We're working on upgraded documentation for omscan best practices as we understand many customers don't really know what needs to be done here.

Oh, common.. could've stored the name in one place.

No it can't because in a larger config these might all be on different servers. However, you're right, a tool could be provided. However, this is *not* really a frequent operation for a mailserver, given all the DNS trouble, etc., it usually causes.

And this is so not true for Oracle Database Server. Oracle has notes on how to deal with it, w/o comments like And remember, what you just did was a bad idea.

It certainly is when Oracle lives on the network and listener config is involved as in almost all cases. Put some Oracle apps on top and it's almost as complex. You're right on the quote and I have changed the doc with some more appropriate wording.

Need to go to a tradeshow now, will respond with more later.

Florian.

[netcomrade]

anybody home?

looks like 1 scalix hour equals to X normal hours, as I still haven't heard from support

[kanderson]

It's only fair for me to point out here that I've offered help behind the scenes. Either through Digital Adrenaline or by escalating it with Scalix. You have not responded to me. I recognize I am not Scalix. And I am not. However, my role as a partner is to assist. I can help them with tech work, I can provide sales.

AFAIK, Reiser allocates inodes dynamically, so it should never run out. I've seen it happen with EXT2/3, but never with Reiser.

Kev.

[kanderson]

netcomrade,

Don't misunderstand my earlier post. I'm not meaning to blame you for being frustrated at a lack of responsiveness.

I'm just pointing out that there will be times where Scalix is busy, Florian noted that he's at a trade show, so this is clearly one of those times. During that time, you can also rely on the partners, as we are here to help.

If you don't currently have a partner, feel free to contact one offlist, myself included.

Kev.