[OT] Re: MS Exchange server on FreeBSD?

[Ean Kingston]

> On Fri, 2005-03-18 at 08:06, Christian Tischler wrote:
>> Hi,
>> I would like to run an MS exchange server. But I am not at all willing
>> to set up an MS box at all. As I know I could run something like VMware
>> virtual server or Wine, but I do not know if such an combination would
>> be stable (sopken in terms of windows stability). The next consideration
>> would be the performance of the overal setup.
>>
>> Any hints or suggenstions would be great.

As someone who has inhereted an Exchange server I have a few hints for you.

1 Run Exchange on a Dedicated Windows Server (2000 or 2003). Do not fiddle
with VMware or Wine. You are going to need a license for Windows to run
Exchange under VMware (or bochs). You are probably going to need a license
of Windows to run it under wine (if that is even possible). In any case,
you will lose stability if you don't dedicate a system to Windows.

2 You need to keep the disk where Exchange stores its mail database at
least 55% free or Exchange will not work properly. This is because you
need to periodically rebuild the Exchange database to keep performance
tollerable. Also when mail is deleted in an exchange mail store, it is not
actually deleted but just marked for deletion. You need to take the mail
store offline (so nobody can access their mailbox) periodically and run a
tool to purge the deleted items. This takes hours on any decent sized mail
system. When this happens it creates temporary files roughly 110% the size
of the mail store.

3 Exchange is a pig. You would be best to have another Windows system
running Active Directory to support your Exchange server. If you are
thinking of using the Active Directory emulation available in Samba,
forget it. Exchange changes the structure of the Active Directory when it
is installed. You need a real Active Directory server.

4 On the topic of Exchange being a pig; you should set up a couple of
FreeBSD systems that act as your MX hosts for inbound e-mail. Put
something like Postfix or Exim (or any other smtp software you like) on
there and setup at least simple spam filtering (even if it is just RBLs).
Have these Postfix (or exim) system feed mail to your Exchange server.
There are articles on the Web about how to get Postfix to check the
validity of recipients against an Exchange server so you can bounce bogus
mail at the border if you want. You could also have this system do the
virus scanning (again numerous articles are available).

5 Exchange does an enormous amount of logging so those disks are going to
fill up quickly. You need to run special tools before you delete the logs
or you run the risk of not being able to recover your mail database in the
event of catastrophic failure. Read over item 3 again, the process is
similar.

6 Exchange shuts down when the disk that holds the mail store is 90% full.
It will not restart until you free up some disk space. If you reach this
situation you probably aren't following point 5 or point 3 enough.

7 Familiarize yourself with
http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb;en-us;313184&spid=1760&sid=global
you are going to be reading it (and related sites) a lot.

8 Unless you have users demanding shared calendars and automatic meeting
scheduling, try to find a solution other than Exchange. I'm partial to
Postfix, Courier-IMAP, OpenLDAP, SquirrelMail.

> I have never heard of anyone using Exchange on a non-Windows machine,
> and I can't see much point.  The license fee for Exchange swamps the OS
> license.  I expect you could run VMWare with Windows as a guest OS, but
> for something as critical as your mail server, I would dedicate a
> Windows machine to it. I doubt it would work with WINE.
>
> Basically, if you have to hold your nose to run Exchange, you may as
> well hold it a little tighter and run Windows.  If not, look at
> FreeBSD/Sendmail-or-Postfix/Evolution as a very reliable mail service.
>
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-- 
Ean Kingston
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