Linux

Cisco buying Postpath?

Tim Robichaux — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 22:15:52 GMT

I know that the rumors had been floating around for a while, but now the news is out. Cisco is purchasing the privately held Postpath for $215 million dollars. This is really interesting to me in that I've been working with Postpath for a short while and I'm really wondering about the value that Cisco is going to pull out of this deal. For starters, in this article, it's mentioned that Postpath:

"...provides a browser-independent AJAX Web client."

The reason I have a problem with that line is that the Postpath client is actually Zimbra's client.

I'm sure technical blogs are popping up all over the place talking about the things that Postpath can and can't do, but having installed it a couple of times and poked around inside, it seems like there is going to be a battle over some of the features. For example:

ActiveSync - Postpath reverse-engineered ActiveSync rather than licensing it (say, like Apple), and I'm not sure how Microsoft will react to a large company like Cisco selling reverse-engineered technology.
Exchange compatibility - I know that Postpath advertises that it integrates well with Exchange 2003 (and can exist in that environment), but how does it work with Exchange 2007, where there are significant changes to the architecture.
Price comparison - When I looked at Postpath the cost comparison felt a little bit shady, but I don't want to sink into a full teardown. The main point is that they make some pretty grand claims about the savings that they can provide a company.

I really don't want to turn this into a Postpath bashing blog post, but I really don't see why so many people think that this will allow Cisco to become a major player in the messaging marketplace. If they were purchasing something like Zimbra, then I would give credence to the idea that they were looking to field a product that would really be commercially viable.

Having installed and used at least 5 messaging platforms in the past year, I kind of have to wonder about Cisco's choice. At least it wasn't Lotus...

E-Mail Platforms Part One

Tim Robichaux — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 20:26:20 GMT

Recently, I've gotten to install a bunch of different e-mail platforms. This has been quite an experience, both fun and frustrating. While I'm planning on writing about each platform in detail, later, I wanted to put down some of the problems that I ran into.This is just a short list of things that I noticed when installing some of the platforms. I’ll start off with the ones that weren’t much trouble and then move into the ones that were painful:

Zimbra – This was, by far, the easiest of the non-Exchange installs. With the Ubuntu server taking only about 15 minutes to install, and then another 15 to update and add the extra packages that are required, it was a pretty painless server setup. The install of Zimbra, itself, was quick and painless as well. The only information that you really have to have set up ahead of time is the license file. The one complaint that I had about this package was that I wasn’t able to find an easy way to add multiple users, from a text file or something like that. It may exist, I just didn’t spend too much time looking, since it was only 20 users. Another thing is that I don’t know of an easy way to change the certificate to a non-self-signed one. I know the instructions are out there, but it has just been a low priority.

Blackberry – Because it is built on the Exchange 2007 platform, the e-mail portion of this was very simple. Once it was time to install the Blackberry Enterprise Server software, things got a little more complicated. There were several prerequisites that needed to be installed, but the documentation and instructions was excellent. The instructions were clear and concise and had screen captures of how to do everything. The only thing that happened that I wasn’t happy with was that to register a handheld, you either have to plug it directly in to the server or the user has to be able to get an e-mail with the activation/configuration PIN. Once this info is entered in to the Blackberry device, the sync occurs, but when I first started the setup, I couldn’t provision users because I had not enabled inbound mail. The initial sync took a long time to complete (several hours) but I don’t think that’s because of the setup.

Domino – This has been a difficult product to set up, simply because it is so different from the Exchange way of doing things. There is also very little documentation regarding what I wanted to do, and what there is, often assumes that you are already very familiar with how to do some tasks that are not well described. When installing and setting up the Domino server, the most complicated part was getting SMTP mail working. It wasn’t too difficult, once I knew that I had to create a connection document for SMTP, but it was not something that I was used to doing. Another thing that I haven’t quite gotten is the Sametime integration. I have everything setup on the client machines, but DWA is being obstinate. The main difficulty that I’ve had is that I haven’t been able to find any good books on the product, so it takes me twice as long to figure out how to do something than it does with Exchange (or even Zimbra).

Postpath – Postpath was the most difficult product, hands down. To start off with, just installing the hosting OS was a total pain. Having worked extensively with Ubuntu, Red Hat, SUSE, and Gentoo, I thought that I wouldn’t have any problems with CentOS. That turned out to not be the case and I had to spend several hours wrestling with some of those OS issues. When it came time to install the packages, themselves, I was very unimpressed. The install, configuration and ongoing maintenance is all done from the command line. While I would not normally complain about this, it turned out to be a big problem when I couldn’t use SSH from a remote computer, so I had to do everything logged in to the console. The install was complex and most things were not explained very well. The documentation was also somewhat lacking, often just describing the options, but not what they do or change. My main gripe with the install process is that the license is only good for one install, so when I had to start over, I had to e-mail Postpath tech support to have them send me a new license key. I found several instances of people complaining about Postpath and it seems like for most versions, it is best to have Postpath servers added to an already existing Exchange environment. One of the threads that I was following had users describing using Exchange 2003 management tools to manage the Postpath servers, but I’m not quite brave enough to try, now that I have it working.

Most of my gripes were fairly minor because most of them came about because the software and methodology are very different that what (as an Exchange admin) I am used to. Zimbra seems like a product that a well trained monkey could install, but Domino needs a lot of experience and a good bit of time spent searching for answers.

PostPath on CentOS

Tim Robichaux — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 07:10:09 GMT

One of the products that I've gotten a chance to work with, here at 3Sharp, has been PostPath. Billed as a Microsoft Exchange alternative, it is a set of Open Source packages and management tools that emulate an Exchange server in an Active Directory environment. I am not doing a lot with this product at the moment, but when I was setting it up, I ran into a couple of problems. While I was able to work around them, I thought that I would talk about the two major problems that I ran into.

Installing the host OS

When I started this install, I was using an ISO of the CentOS 4.6 DVD, targeting a VM. While the install seemed to go along fine, I made sure to pick the settings that were going to impact the end result. In particular, I made sure to leave a big chunk of space on the drive to format as XFS for the mail store. The other thing that I was particular about was turning off the firewall, since I have a nice ISA server already, and I didn't want to worry about port conflicts. I ran through the install a couple of times to experiment with the best selection of packages. I did try installing a GUI, but I decided that was a bad idea when it took me a full 10 minutes to get the video to display correctly. In a production Linux server, there should be very little need for a GUI, but I thought it would be a fun experiment.

Once I had the host installed and configured and updated, I thought that it was now time to move into the install of the PostPath product.

Installing PostPath

From the start, I was experiencing problems with the host OS. I was using Putty to SSH into the VM so that I would be able to cut and paste and work is just a more familiar and forgiving environment than the VMRC console. Using wget and the link they provided, I started to download the software. About halfway through, I was disconnected from my SSH session. After trying to reconnect and having no luck, I decided to log in to the console, but nothing seemed to be wrong. Keeping an eye on the file size, I was able to know when the download was done, and it was time to do the install.

The install itself, was pretty simple and there are some good instructions on PostPath's web site and inside the installer itself. I did have to download some RPMs, but one of the steps was to add a PostPath repository, so I wasn't worried about too many incompatibilities.

Once everything was installed, I mail-enabled all the users and attempted to log in.

Not Quite as Advertised

Well, once I had everything installed, and configured (so I thought), I was quite surprised to find that I was unable to get to the web mail site. After looking at the install closely, I couldn't find anything that was incorrect, so then I looked at the OS. Well, imagine my shock when I noticed that IPTables was turned on! No wonder I wasn't able to get to the site. After stopping the service and using chkconfig to ensure that it didn't come back on again, I was able to get to the site. Once on the site, I was getting more errors. For some reason, I kept getting the message that a network error had occurred. Just because I was a bit peeved, I restarted the server and hoped that I could start fresh after waiting a while for it to come back up.

Once the server was back up and running, I noticed that I was getting a bunch of connection failures from Samba. Seems that the box was unable to talk to our Domain Controller. After doing some digging, I noticed that the time was different from that of my desktop. Looking further, I noticed that NTP was turned off! No time sync = no Kerberos ticket = no connectivity for YOU! What was most surprising about finding that problem was that in the configuration stage for the OS, I distinctly set NTP to run and added the DC as the preferred time server. After adding the server back into the /etc/ntpd.conf and using good ole chkconfig again to make sure ntpd was going to run on all init levels, I started the service and then restarted all the PostPath services.

Success was mine, so far, as I was now able to log in to the web mail and see all that glorious mail goodness. While I did manage to get where I was going, it was fraught with frustration and I still haven't figured out why my SSH connections keep disconnecting and then not letting me back in. Some things I will just have to chalk up to "it's just Linux" even though I haven't had any problems with all the Ubuntu servers I've been running.

Wrapped Up With A Bow

Now that I have it up and running, and I'm able to send e-mail, the next step is to build up a rule to allow the inbound SMTP traffic from the firewall to my box (we have to wait for scheduled maintenance for any changes to production systems). Once that is done, I should be able to send and receive mail, push and pull mail from mobile devices, and access the web mail from the Internet. Once this is honking along, we'll see how good of a replacement it really is. I am really unhappy that it has taken so much work to get this running (as opposed to Exchange and Zimbra) but I am really glad to know that it is not the philosophy, but the particular distribution.