JDPFu.com 2024

I have used Thunderbird for at least 8 yrs and used Mozilla Mail built into Mozilla/Netscape before that. When the company started using Zimbra for email, IM, calendaring, Lightning never quite worked correctly. With v5 of Thunderbird, the integration to Zimbra with Lightning is working well. After using it about 2 months, I haven’t seen any failures – even on complex calendar settings.

Thunderbird v5 + Lightning Installation Steps

These instructions are for Ubuntu, but probably work with other distros too.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/thunderbird-stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install thunderbird  xul-ext-lightning

If it weren’t for Outlook’s inability to support other messaging and calendaring systems with FOSS, MS-Exchange wouldn’t be nearly as popular. Enterprise Calendaring, where each user can see availability for other users, is the holy grail.

July 2011 Update – Things have changed. We don’t need to pay Microsoft (or anyone else) anymore. Read more at the bottom of this article.

MS-Exchange – Calendaring

End users don’t like change. I know this first hand. In my company, I refused to install an MS-Exchange server or MS-SBS. That was unpopular with the users, since MS-Outlook and MS-Exchange just work together. They work together very well, actually, and we all know it. Until you have 50+ users and the license costs explode that is, then it is a huge profit center for Microsoft. That’s the main reason I refused to get hooked on MS-Exchange, future license and migration costs.

Outlook – Calendaring

Outlook doesn’t support calendaring systems from competing solutions very well – or not at all. So, for any calendar server to work with Outlook, it will need to implement the MS-MAPI interface used by MS-Exchange. Lot of companies do that, but ZERO of them do it for free. It feels like a conspiracy to me.

Zimbra Message and Calendaring Server

Zimbra implements a complete functional replacement for what MS-Exchange provides on the server. Email standards are fixed and work even with Outlook, but enterprise calendaring is different. To use that with Zimbra with Outlook, there are two additional requirements.

1. You must use the paid Network Edition of Zimbra
2. You must pay for each Outlook client plug-in deployed

For a small business, it is easier, much easier, to just buy MS-SBS and go.

If you want to be cheap, like us, you simply tell your users to use the Web2.0 AJAX interface built into the free Zimbra for all calendaring needs. It really is a beautiful interface with everything you expect for calendaring, email, contacts, instant messaging, and more. It is less convenient than a thick client, especially when you are off line, but it does work as expected. Heck, our CEO only uses the web interface.

Zimbra provides a java thick client, which implements everything that Outlook does and everything that the ajax web interface does … except it is big and slow, like most java applications. I let my users know about it, 3 tried it and deleted it. The complaints were it was slow and big. We all know that MS-Outlook is slow and big, but somehow that is fine, because it only feels slow and big at startup. The Zimbra thick java client was slow and big all the time.

Other non-MS-Outlook Clients

So, if you mandate no Outlook, you’ll lose. You have to replace Outlook with something better, faster and with all the same functionality. Thunderbird isn’t there, but now that they are working to increase releases, perhaps it will get there. Lightning, the thunderbird calendaring plug-in, is … buggy and basically broke. It is a read-only iCalendar client, no write. I was able to get to the point where zero calendars could be viewed, but reminders still popped up constantly with no way to write any updates back to the zimbra calendar server. Boo. I must say that Thunderbird for email works beautifully with Zimbra but IMAPS and SMTPS are very well understood protocols by all email clients. Any email client will work well with Zimbra.

I’m still looking for a good calendar server and client.

There are other options that show up from time to time. I pull them down, implement a server and try them all out. Most are toys. The Zimbra web interface is the low bar for replacement. If calendaring with a client doesn’t work better than the MS-Outlook/MS-Exchange pair, forget it. If you don’t need enterprise calendaring, there are many, many tight, small, efficient solutions for an enterprise. Heck, a small Linux server running dovecot and postfix can easily support 4000 email only users. EASILY.

No cloud here.

Most of my readers will think AND YELL – gmail and google calendar. Why don’t we just use them? Our corporate data is often sensitive. Sometimes our client’s data is sensitive too, so use of google-almost-anything is against corporate policy.

Stop the Madness

So to remove Microsoft from email and calendaring, we need:

1. Server replacement that supports everything that MS-Exchange/MS-Outlook do
2. Outlook replacement that supports everything that MS-Exchange/MS-Outlook do
3. Enterprise management of the server
4. Enterprise management of the clients
5. Vibrant client plug-in community
6. FOSS!!!

The shortest distance to a workable replacement is probably Zimbra / Thunderbird / Lightning team that actually works for enterprise calendaring. Doing something to help this team is something we can probably do. Let’s git ’er done.

As I actively work this, I’ll post issues and solutions. All three of these parts have had major updates since I tried them too. Perhaps it everything is already solved or at least much closer?

Just reviewed Zimbra / Thunderbird / Lightning Capabilities

Seems they aren’t even trying for complete calendar integration. They just want to view a single calendar. What a waste. Without full, enterprise calendar integration, this is DOA. Worthless for replacing MS-Outlook/Exchange installations.

July 2011 Update

A recent group of upgrades here have convinced me that Zimbra + Thunderbird v5 + the Lightning extension can fully replace MS-Outlook + MS-Exchange. These upgrades were:

• Zimbra Community Edition v7.x
• Thunderbird v5
• Lightning Extension for Calendaring

After performing these upgrades, email, calendaring, enterprise calendaring all work extremely well. I’d even say perfectly. I cannot think of anything that MS-Exchange/Outlook does that this setup doesn’t do better. I’m serious. Read more about Enterprise Calendaring and what that means.

This is a big deal. Of course, to stay on Outlook, a company would need to deploy the paid, Zimbra Network Edition, but for the rest of us, Zimbra+Thunderbird+Lightning are perfect.

I came across an old article that I wrote on backups that had some clock times for the different VMs. Since that article was written, I’ve changed the backup methodology from rsync to rdiff-backup.

dms44 → 1m:52s   Alfresco

crm46 → 3m:36s    vTiger

xen41 → 3m:10s    Typo

pki42 →  1m:17s

mon45 → 1m:8s

zcs43 →  3m:53s   Zimbra

Those are real “downtime” numbers to ensure completely safe backups were made with all files closed. Actually, the virutal machine is shutdown during the backup periods. Email is unavailable for 4 minutes at around 2am daily. We can live with that. Recovery works perfectly too. I’ve recovered the largest VM twice in under 20 minutes after some cockpit errors.

This works because we use Xen virtual machines and rdiff-backup. Most of the VMs are 20GB in disk size, but use less actual storage.

Show your CEO the cost savings between Microsoft solutions (MS-Office, Exchange, AD, CALs) as you propose replacing them with Open Source Software, OSS, that include commercial support.

• MS-Exchange —> Zimbra
• MS-Exchange Calendaring —> Zimbra
• MS-Active Directory —> OpenLDAP
• MS-Outlook —> whatever client you like that’s free; Try Thunderbird or whatever Apple gives away or Enlightenment
• MS-Sharepoint —> Alfresco
• Shared Drives —> Samba and/or Alfresco
• MS-Print Servers —> Samba/CUPS with printer driver support
• MS-Office —> OpenOffice

Add up all that you’re paying for this stuff. Spend 2 hours researching what commercial support for the FOSS stuff costs – estimate $15k for each except those items that just work like OO, Samba and OpenLDAP.

MS Costs	FOSS Costs
$4.5M	$60k

Enough said? No? Ok, use Xen to host all these things. Your disk costs for EMC/NetApp/Whatever won’t change. Your clustering costs will require consultants … 1 time to setup until your team becomes knowledgeable.

Hardware? Use this as the call to virtualization that your organization needs already. When you’re all done, you’ll have half as many servers as before. You’ll probably save many, many more in actuality.

Training? When the CEO shares the overall cost savings with his team and it gets out to the every day workers, they may still complain a little, but they were complaining about MS stuff before.

Outcomes:

• huge cost savings for very minor changes to capability – you’ll need to judge that for yourself
• 2x hardware (or more) reduction
• ongoing software license costs cut by over 50% (just the MS stuff here – this doesn’t save on your CRM, SAS, Oracle costs)
• No Vista upgrade looming
• No desktop CAL and no desktop MS-Office licenses; well, you’ll probably have to retain a few. Or perhaps the CEO will mandate 1 Exchange server for him and his team, but everyone else needs to migrate to Zimbra.

Further, if you can replace WinXP with Linux (not everyone can), you’ll see

• No more “hardware is too slow” upgrades
• “Hardware broken” replacement cycle every 5-7 years
• Employees will use work computers for work, since the same programs they use at home won’t run without tinkering at work.
• There are many, many excellent FOSS programs that businesses use today. MS-IIS —> Apache; PBX —> Asterisk; many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, others.
• WINE will run many, many Win32 programs.

All of these replacements have support contracts available, so there is strong commercial support, should you need it. OTOH, if you have a small team of experts, you can probably get the FOSS versions up and running in less than a week and never need to pay anyone for support outside your current staff. This is idea for proof of concepts and other trials. If you are an enterprise looking for support, that’s fine – compare $15k-$30k per year to what ever you’re currently paying MS. I worked at a place where we paid MS over $5M/yr in support and licenses just for desktops (OS, MS-Office, CALs, AD).

Best of all, all those replacements don’t require MS-Windows. They work with whatever clients you like … well, that isn’t entirely true. Zimbra FOSS doesn’t do any calendaring with Outlook 2003 and perhaps 2007. Is that a bad thing?

Lastly, use this swap as a way to improve the way your company does things. Don’t just replace shared folders with samba – use a document management system like Alfresco and migrate users into it. To start, they can use it just like shared folders. Over time, you’ll get better as it and implement triggers for when documents arrive or leave the system. For example, you can have every document loaded into directory XYZ automatically converted into HTML and dropped into another folder. Or implement document review work flows. Start small but grow into the full capabilities.

The key thing with all these solutions is that the data is yours. It isn’t locked up in some proprietary format.

• Don’t like Alfresco? Connect to the repository with CIFS and copy all the documents out and load them into Documentum or back to shared drives.
• Don’t like Zimbra? The message store is just IMAP. Calendars can be exported with ICS. Contacts can be exported too. I haven’t found where the distribution lists and aliases are stored, but the DBs are OpenLDAP and MySQL. How tough will it be?

Whatever … it’s your data.

I feel bad for those who can’t throw MS completely out for whatever reason. For example, many of the telephony, scanning and fax servers only run on Win32 servers and only connect with Exchange.

Blackberry users – take heart – Zimbra has a Blackberry interface. Many other smartphones also have interfaces and there is a generic J2ME interface for all the rest.

How to install Zimbra on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

What I need:

1. Zimbra server running under Xen
2. Prefer Ubuntu 8.0x LTS as Dom0

The problems seen doing this so far are:

1. Prefer an Ubuntu-based DomU – <— couldn’t get the zimbra supported version to load
2. file: needs to be replace by aio:tap: for some reason in the cfg file
3. Tried CentOS-5 via bootstrap – didn’t work
4. Tried CentOS-5 via rinse – didn’t work – stuck at maintenance boot but didn’t know the root password
5. Replaced the CentOS image file with another … and got further after switching from hda2 into sda1 in the cfg file based on error. But the start up had many, many issues – missing modules – i.e. FATAL problems
6. Along the way, there have been numerous other issues to be solved (NIC drivers, vbd device limits, etc)

There needs to be an easier way and one that actually works with the scripts would be really nice too.

BTW, getting a xen hardy DomU installed is trivial. It will be nice when Zimbra supports the current 8.04.x LTS, which they have committed to do … someday.

Ok, someday seems to be TODAY! YIPPY! 8.04 supported!

10/18/2008 Update

It has been a few months since we started using Xen for our infrastructure. The jury is still out on whether it is a success or not. Two days ago, I would have said it was a complete success … until more of the MAJOR network issues happened yesterday – a Friday.

Some of the DomUs became really slow to access over both the network and by the console. The Dom0 became nearly impossible to access. Ping had 88% packet loss both from other machines and between DomU and Dom0 attempts (once I finally got a connection). Not good. Long periods of un-responsiveness to/from both Dom0 and DomU from other non-virtual machines got really, really bad. It is terrible this morning as I write this.
Last night, I implemented these changes:

1. to the /etc/network/interface file
   • DomUs: post-up /usr/sbin/ethtool -K eth0 tx off
   • Dom0: post-up /usr/sbin/ethtool -K eth0 tx on
2. to the /etc/rc.local
   • mv /lib/tls /lib/tls.disabled

So every reboot will reset tls to the desired value – gone. That last command is part of the server setup. It came back, probably due to an apt-get upgrade.

Neither of these changes appear to matter this morning.

How to install Zimbra on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS