gary’s web sofa

Back in the old days phone and fax was king. E-mail was nifty gimmick, but nothing more. All you needed to do to provide e-mail to your users was to give them access on their desktop. You could get away with draconian inbox size limits to simplify your storage and backup requirements. An outage of a couple of hours was no big deal.

Because of this we had loads of different options if you needed email. You could use an “enterprise” platform like Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and the like, or you could roll your own with any number of SMTP, POP or IMAP servers running on Linux (my preference right now is Postfix & Dovecot running on Debian).

Now days you can’t easily get away with the DIY approach. E-mail is has to a large extent replaced voice & fax as the prime business communication method. We need to support huge inboxes, instant delivery of messages, access on the road, and near perfect uptime and backups. Most of these things can be achieved with any modern email setup, however some require a little help from outside.

Remote access is a major requirement these days. An executive feels naked on the golf course unless he’s got a Blackberry, a Treo, a Symbian or a Windows Mobile smartphone on his hip (mine is a Nokia e61). You’ve got three options if you want to get email onto these things:

1. Scheduled checking of a POP/IMAP server: It works, but there’ll be a delay because the message doesn’t get pushed to the device as soon as it comes in.
2. Blackbery Enterprise Server: Native support for Blackberry units, and add-in support for other platforms. It only supports Exchange, Notes, or GroupWise servers though
3. Microsoft Exchange Direct Push: Native support for Windows Mobile units and add-in support for other platforms. Only supports MS Exchange servers obviously.

The other major issue is how to back them up. You not only have to worry about DR backups, but also compliance. A nightly backup isn’t good enough any more. You either need to run a continuous backup or run a parallel archiving solution.

At issue here is that the remote access and backup requirements require 3rd party support. 3rd parties target their efforts where they’ll get the most business, so There’s no support outside the big three (Exchange, Notes & GroupWise). Nobody’s deploying new Notes or GroupWise installations anymore, so as much as I hate to say it, Exchange is the only option if you need to provide effective remote access and require effective backup.

Aaaaaggghhh!!!!! My house is totally 802.11g. There’s a server, a few desktops, a laptop and even a couple of PDAs around and there’s no way the ball & chain would allow CAT5 tacked to the skirting boards. 54Mbs is the theoretical maximum, but that never happens. Most of the time I just move email and web stuff around, so it’s not a big deal. The only exception is when I’m moving video between my laptop and my desktop. The desktop supports gigabit Ethernet, but the laptop is 10/100 only. Both have FireWire built in (very handy for iPods and pulling video off DV camcorders) and Windows XP supports TCP/IP over the link, so I can use it as a quick and dirty 400Mbs LAN point to point network. At least I could….

I “upgraded” to Vista a couple of months ago and it’s a crock, but it’s not enough of a crock to make me reinstall XP Pro. Today was the first time I wanted to move a serious chunk of data between my laptop and the desktop. I plugged the cable in and nothing happened. Then I remembered that seeing as I formatted and reinstalled the desktop, I’d need to set n IP address, so I went into the network and sharing center in control panel….. The wireless adapter was there, as was the wired NIC, but no sign of the FireWire interface. I knew the FireWire card was set up because my iPod has been connected since the upgrade, so I checked Google to see if anyone else had the same problem. I found this. Microsoft removed the feature because they have “not identified any customer dependency” on this feature. Bastards!