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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 read a comment on a popular blog site today where people were complaining that Ubuntu didn’t work with their computer. They’d tried a few different versions and it still didn’t work. Of course, they blamed Ubuntu, not the hardware provider.

Some complained about sound or video or wireless cards not working. I’ve had issues with RAID cards not working beyond a basic level; JBOD only, no RAID support. In the old days, the complaints were with modems (win-modems) not working.

In their mind, Ubuntu wants them to switch from the other operating system and needs to do whatever it takes to support that. Clearly they are confused. Ubuntu has very little to do with which hardware is supported. Very little.

So, I found a few free minutes today and decided to upgrade this blog to the latest release. This was a security related update, seems Typo had a few security vulnerabilities. As usual, things mostly went fine following the instructions provided by the upgrade web page. Mostly.

Overview of the Steps

I’ve written more than a few Nokia N800 Articles and figured that a central location listing them might be appreciated.

Just because you are a home Windows user doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have good password management practices. Core to achieving that are:

1. Changing passwords regularly
2. Having long enough passwords
3. Having complex enough passwords
4. Not reusing passwords
5. Locking accounts for incorrect password attempts

In most companies, password policies are set by the IT guys through an Active Directory Domain Controller. If you have an AD controller at home, you aren’t reading this story anyway.

Err http://ppa.launchpad.net hardy/main Packages
  404 Not Found
Err http://ppa.launchpad.net hardy/universe Packages
  404 Not Found
W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/madman2k/ubuntu/dists/hardy/main/binary-i386/Packages.gz  404 Not Found

W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/madman2k/ubuntu/dists/hardy/universe/binary-i386/Packages.gz  404 Not Found

E: Some index files failed to download, they have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

Ouch.

I knew hardy support would eventually go away, but not before the next LTS release which isn’t scheduled for 4 months.

Fixed, 3 Days later ….

Sadly, the answer to which virtualization is best for Linux isn’t an easy one to answer. There are many different factors that go into the answer. While I cannot answer the question, since your needs and mine are different, I can provide a little background on what I chose and why. We won’t discuss why you should be running virtualization or which specific OSes to run. You already know why.

Key things that go into my answer

1. I’m not new to UNIX. I’ve been using UNIX since 1992.
2. I don’t need a GUI. Actually, I don’t want a GUI and the overhead that it demands.
3. I would prefer to pay for support, when I need it, but not be forced to pay to do things we all need to accomplish – backups for example.
4. My client OSes won’t be Windows. They will probably be the same OS as the hypervisor hosting them. There are some efficiencies in doing this like reduced virtualization overhead.
5. I try to avoid Microsoft solutions. They often come with additional requirements that, in turn, come with more requirements. Soon, you’re running MS-ActiveDirectory, MS-Sharepoint, MS-SQL, and lots of MS-Windows Servers. With that come the MS-CALs. No thanks.
6. We’re running servers, not desktops. Virtualization for desktops implies some other needs (sound, graphics acceleration, USB).
7. Finally, we’ll be using Intel Core 2 Duo or better CPUs. They will have VT-x support enabled and 8GB+ of RAM. AMD makes fine CPUs too, but during our recent upgrade cycle, Intel had the better price/performance ratio.

Major Virtualization Choices

1. VMware ESXi 4 (don’t bother with 3.x at this point)
2. Sun VirtualBox
3. KVM as provided by RedHat or Ubuntu
4. Xen as provided by Ubuntu

I currently run all of these except KVM, so I think I can say which I prefer and which is proven.

ESXi 4.x

I run this on a test server just to gain knowledge. I’ve considered becoming VMware Certified and may still get certified, which is really odd. I don’t believe many mainstream certifications mean much, except CISSP, VMware, Oracle DBA and Cisco. I dislike that VMware has disabled things that used to work in prior versions to encourage full ESX deployments over the free ESXi. Backups at the hypervisor level, for example. I’ve been using some version of VMware for about 5 years.

A negative, VMware can be picky about which hardware it will support. Always check the approved hardware list. Almost every desktop motherboard will not have a supported network card and may not like the disk controller, so spending another $30-$200 on networking will be necessary.

ESXi is rock solid. No crashes, ever. There are many very large customers running thousands of VMware ESX server hosts.

Sun VirtualBox

I run this on my laptop because it is the easiest hypervisor to use. Also, since this works on desktops, it includes USB pass thru capabilities. That’s a good thing, except, it is also the least stable hypervisor that I use. That system locks up about once a month for no apparent reason. That is unacceptable for a server under any conditions. The host OS is Windows7 x64, so that could be the stability issue. I do not play on this Windows7 machine. The host OS is almost exclusively used as a platform for running VirtualBox and very little else.

Until VirtualBox gains stability, it isn’t suitable for use on servers, IMHO.

Xen (Ubuntu patches)

I run this on 2 servers each running about 6 client Linux systems. During system updates, another 6 systems can be spawned as part of the backout plan or for testing new versions of stuff. I built the systems over the last few years using carefully selected name brand parts. I don’t use HVM mode, so each VM runs with 97% of native hardware performance by running the same kernel.

There are downsides to Xen.

1. Whenever the Xen kernel gets updated, this is a big deal, requiring the hypervisor be rebooted. In fact, I’ve had to reboot the hypervisor 3 times after a single kernel update before it takes in all the clients. Now I plan for that.
2. Kernel modules have to be manually copied into each VM, which isn’t a big deal, but does have to be done.
3. I don’t use a GUI, that’s my preference. If you aren’t experienced with UNIX, you’ll want to find a GUI to help create, configure and manage Xen infrastructure. I have a few scripts – vm_create, kernel_update, and lots of chained backup scripts to get the work done.
4. You’ll need to roll your own backup method. There are many, many, many, many options. If you’re having trouble determining which hypervisor to use, you don’t have a chance to determine the best backup method. I’ve discussed backup options extensively on this blog.
5. No USB pass thru, that I’m aware. Do you know something different?

I’ve only had 1 crash after a kernel update with Xen and that was over 8 months ago. I can’t rule out cockpit error.
Xen is what Amazon EC2 uses. They have millions of VMs. Now, that’s what I call scalability. This knowledge weighed heavily on my decision.

KVM

I don’t know much about KVM. I do know that both RedHat and Ubuntu are migrating to KVM as the default virtualization hypervisor in their servers since the KVM code was added to the Linux kernel. Conanacal’s 10.04 LTS release will also include an API 100% compatible with Amazon’s EC2 API, binary compatible VM images, and VM cluster management. If I were deploying new servers today, I’d at least try the beta 9.10 Server and these capabilities. Since we run production servers on Xen, until KVM and the specific version of Ubuntu required are supported by those apps, I don’t see us migrating.

Did I miss any important concerns?

It is unlikely that your key things match mine. Let me know in the comments.

Windows7 is an improvement over other versions in many ways, except they decided to waste too much screen with pretty and thick boarders by default. Additionally, the window title bar seems to be 2x larger than under XP. No thanks.

It has bothered me for a few months, but not enough to search and try a few things until today. Even with the changes, the window borders and title bar are still too think for my tastes, but at least it is a little better.

The settings can be found in the Window Color and Appearance settings of Windows7. The Items to change are:

1. Active Title Bar – size 17 is the smallest it will accept
2. Border Padding – size 0 is the smallest setting
3. Active Window Border – size 1 is the smallest

You can also make scroll bars thinner, if you like. Initially, I went too thin and had to make them a little larger so usability wasn’t completely lost. Here’s the resulting border. Sadly, there is still way too much wasted space in my opinion.

I have no use for the part of the window with the Organize or Include in Library stuff. That entire menu is worthless to me. Let me know if you know how to remove that section. Please.

If you miss X-Mouse from Tweak-UI in the PowerToys, here’s a solution to have the focus follow the mouse. I like option 3 and have pulled the regedit file down. Unix people will appreciate this. It is nice to have the active window not necessarily pulled to the foreground just because it is active.

You may not have heard that the Ubuntu guys are planning to remove The Gimp from the default desktop installs in the next LTS release of Ubuntu. Good. The Gimp is very capable, but I’ve never found a use for it. Never. It is too complex for my rotate, crop, remove red-eye needs.

There are a few excellent options, but it seems most of them have issues for me. I like a lite desktop – no Gnome, no KDE, so anything that requires those libraries is to be avoided. The only think worse is to include Mono. Mono is an FOSS implementation of Microsoft’s .NET libraries.

I generally deal with photos very little, unless I’m using scripts to attach GPS lat/lon to the EXIF data in the files or rotate them. Recently, I installed digiKam, a KDE app, but only because it made attaching GPS EXIF data easier. I avoid using it.

Well, I came across an article concerning 3 Gimp replacements that got me thinking. That link was really, really slow for me too. Of the choices, only 1, f-spot, is in the default repositories for my LTS distribution. For fun, I did an install, here’s the dependency data.

$ sudo apt-get install f-spot

Reading package lists… Done

Building dependency tree       

Reading state information… Done

The following extra packages will be installed:

  cli-common libart2.0-cil libflickrnet2.1.5-cil libgconf2.0-cil

  libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil libgnome2.0-cil

  libgtk2.0-cil libgtkhtml3.14-19 libgtkhtml3.16-cil libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil

  libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo1.0-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil

  libmono-corlib1.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil libmono-data-tds1.0-cil

  libmono-data-tds2.0-cil libmono-security1.0-cil libmono-security2.0-cil

  libmono-sharpzip0.84-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil libmono-sqlite2.0-cil

  libmono-system-data1.0-cil libmono-system-data2.0-cil

  libmono-system-web1.0-cil libmono-system-web2.0-cil libmono-system1.0-cil

  libmono-system2.0-cil libmono0 libmono1.0-cil libmono2.0-cil

  libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil mono-common mono-gac mono-jit

  mono-runtime sqlite

Suggested packages:

  monodoc-gtk2.0-manual libgtkhtml3.14-dbg libmono-winforms2.0-cil libgdiplus

  libmono-winforms1.0-cil sqlite-doc

Recommended packages:

  dcraw libmono-i18n1.0-cil libmono-i18n2.0-cil

WOW! That’s a bunch of crap to be forced to load for 1 app that I’ll use perhaps once a month. No thanks. Further, the last package, sqlite, is concerning, since I use the sqlite3 package all the time. Forcing an older package – boo.

I hope the Ubuntu guys consider bloat, which is what they are trying to get away from by not including The Gimp after all. Some people like iTunes and others like the original WinAMP. I’m in the later group. Keep it simple, please.

We’ve been using SysUsage to monitor general performance of our Linux servers for a few years. Version 3 was released recently with a new web GUI and simpler installation, but not quite the trivial apt-get install that we’d all love. View a demo.

Anyway, go grab a copy of the source tgz and follow along.

 tar zxvf SysUsage-Sar-3.0.tar.gz
 cd Sys*0
 sudo apt-get install sysstat rrdtool librrds-perl
 perl Makefile.PL
 make
 sudo make install
 sudo crontab -e

Drop these lines into the root crontab.

*/1 * * * * /usr/local/sysusage/bin/sysusage > /dev/null 2>&1

*/5 * * * * /usr/local/sysusage/bin/sysusagegraph > /dev/null 2>&1

I performed these steps using Cluster SSH on almost all our Ubuntu 8.04.x servers; each installation worked.

If you have Apache running in the normal place, browse over to http://localhost/sysusage/ ,
If you don’t run a web server, try firefox /var/www/htdocs/sysusage/index.html to see the results.

Further, our simple rsync over ssh scripts to pull the SysUsage output back to a central performance server are still working. Some of the old data from the v2.12 of the program is still inside the RRD files. It isn’t clear at this point whether the data will be used in the new graphs or not. It takes about a day for the graphs to become useful.