[OT] Re: MS Exchange server on FreeBSD?

[John]

On Fri, Mar 18, 2005 at 11:45:25AM -0500, Ean Kingston wrote:
> 
> > 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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> >

Don't you all want to at least mention Open Groupware?

http://www.opengroupware.org/

I have never used it, which is why I have not said anything 'til now -
I was hoping someone with some experience would jump in.
AFAIK, this is coming long, and the base code is free, but some
of the plugins you may need to support certain clinets (including
Outlook?) may have a cost associated with them, directly or in
getting needed support.

Check it out - I don't mean to lead you down a rat hole, but you
may find something of value there!

I'm going to try it as soon as I get some free time... (YEAH, RIGHT!!!)
-- 

John Lind
john at starfire.MN.ORG