I've finally got some time to update on Merak.
How is it shaping up compared to Exchange 5.5?
This isn't going to be straightforward. Providing you use Outlook 2002 or higher, connect to the mail server via IMAP and install the connector plugin (which gives you the calendar functionality) then the functionality appears to be very close to what you would get with Exchange.
I'm going to have to check our licenses, but I think we've got enough Exchange 2000 CALs for the users here to allow them to use Outlook 2002.
The web client works very much like Outlook, as long as you go to http://servername:32000/mail. If you go to http://servername:32000/webmail you get a different interface! Just logging straight onto http://servername:32000 used to take you to the first interface, now it takes you to the second one. And I've absolutely no idea why.
The admin tools, although nice to use, do seem to be missing some functionality (such as mailbox aliases) but it could just be that I haven't found out how Merak does it. (Update: According to the Merak website it does do aliases - it just doesn't tell you how.)
Right, I'm off to play with Merak's Instant Messaging functionality. More later.
. . . .
That didn't take too long. Merak supports the Jabber protocol - so any IM client that supports Jabber should work with it. I used Spark which really seems to work rather well.
. . . .
Final bit for today - looking for an alternative to Outlook, which also supports calendars.
After a bit of a hunt, Thunderbird comes out as a possible solution. In fact, Thunderbird is recommended on the Marek website. Getting everything working, on the other hand, is rather less straight forward.
The instructions were, as usual, less than helpful. In fact, to get the calendar functionality working you also need to use the Lightning plugin. Now, this isn't the full story either. According to Marek's documents you should be able to connect to the calendar using the syntax http://servername/WebDAV and then use your full email address for the user name.
This doesn't actually work. Lightning doesn't have anywhere to enter your details. It turns out that you'll need to enter the following: http://username:password@servername:32000/WebDAV. The calendar syncs automatically with the server, and any changes made locally are immediately synced with the server.
Once you've set up Thunderbird to use IMAP for the email protocol and Lightning for the calendaring functions (providing you don't need shared calendars) then you've actually got a pretty nice cross-platform replacement for Outlook.
Showing posts with label Merak. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Merak. Show all posts
Monday, 10 September 2007
Friday, 7 September 2007
Nobodys Working #2
Back on the coalface, here we are playing with the new Mail Server.
For me the jury is still out on Merac. I've got it sending and receiving email for our test domain - which is good.
The server collapsed in a heap the second one of my managers asked to see it in action - which is less good.
Now I have been configuring a lot of stuff on the test server today, and running it on a virtual server is less than ideal (at least, one using SATA drives like ours), so I'll have to keep an eye on it and see if this happens again.
Having incoming and outgoing mail working certainly makes me happier about the product - now I'll have to find out how to configure it to do everything that we want.
For reference, when it comes to diagnosing problems with email servers SMTPDIAG is your best friend in sorting things out (on Windows at any rate). Between that, and realising that our current mailserver redirects all outgoing mail via an external proxy (so we needed an exception adding for our test domain) got everything working.
Next task: getting the calendar working.
And it looks like that task wasn't too difficult - apart from the fact that it isn't documented. Hmm, I can see a pattern emerging here.
By default, when a user clicks on the calendar button from the web interface they'll get an error message "Could not login to calendar server".
To get the calendar functionality working, you'll need to do the following from the Merak admin tool.
For me the jury is still out on Merac. I've got it sending and receiving email for our test domain - which is good.
The server collapsed in a heap the second one of my managers asked to see it in action - which is less good.
Now I have been configuring a lot of stuff on the test server today, and running it on a virtual server is less than ideal (at least, one using SATA drives like ours), so I'll have to keep an eye on it and see if this happens again.
Having incoming and outgoing mail working certainly makes me happier about the product - now I'll have to find out how to configure it to do everything that we want.
For reference, when it comes to diagnosing problems with email servers SMTPDIAG is your best friend in sorting things out (on Windows at any rate). Between that, and realising that our current mailserver redirects all outgoing mail via an external proxy (so we needed an exception adding for our test domain) got everything working.
Next task: getting the calendar working.
And it looks like that task wasn't too difficult - apart from the fact that it isn't documented. Hmm, I can see a pattern emerging here.
By default, when a user clicks on the calendar button from the web interface they'll get an error message "Could not login to calendar server".
To get the calendar functionality working, you'll need to do the following from the Merak admin tool.
- Select the GroupWare section
- Click the DB Settings button
- Click Create Tables and wait for the confirmation message
Wednesday, 5 September 2007
Nobodys working #1
Well, here we are at work. What is nobody doing today? Installing a virtual Windows 2003 Server ready to start testing IceWarp's Merak Mail Server.
(How far along is it?. . . . Still formatting C:.)
We've already bought it - but this is just to get a bit of experience before the real install once the license / server hardware arrives.
One thing that surprised me is that it doesn't have it's own database backend - instead it relies upon either an Access .MDB file (yuk!) or an external database. For me it's a toss-up between MySQL and Microsoft SQL Express. As the price is the same for both (free) and seeing as I already run SQL Server 2000 servers here then the obvious choice is SQL Express.
Dear reader, don't take this as a slight against Open Source. I really like Open Source products. I run Linux at home as my main OS and have done for around five years now, but at work - well, standardisation is king. This is also because I won't be the only person maintaining this and, well, Microsoft's SQL Server (and Express too) have very good management tools. Yes, MySQL is getting better, but it isn't there yet.
(Copying files. . . .)
So on to Merak. Not a particularly well known product, at least, I've never heard of it before now. One of it's selling points is that it fits in well with Exchange clients, supports shared calendars, has loads of plugins to extend the functionality of the server, and it is a damn site cheaper than Exchange. It is also cheaper to add additional user licenses to it. Apparently we've bought 1000 user licenses for this.
(Please wait. . . Oh, we've rebooted. Hang on a tick, I'd better get the rest of the install under way.)
Merak can run on either Linux or Windows. It looks like it supports most of the major Linux distros. As we are integrating this into our Active Domain structure we're having to use Windows Server 2003.
("Setup will complete in 39 minutes". Yeah, sure it will.)
All the files are available on the Merak website, and will run quite happily for 30 days before you have to register it. Once you give it your license key then the demo becomes the full, unrestricted version.
(Adding the machine details. One question. Which berk decided to make Tijuana the default time zone for Windows installs?)
Once the initial server install is done, then I'll install SQL Server Express. I've not had chance to play with this yet, so if it turns out to be crap then I'll switch over the MySQL. Hopefully it won't come to that. Let's have a look at what it provides, while I'm waiting for the server install to finish.
. . . .
Scratch that, we're going to have to use MySQL. The limits on the database size and number of processors would cripple the mail server. Thank you Microsoft.
("Installing start menu items. Setup will complete in approximately 19 minutes". Liar. )
Right, I'm off to lunch now. Hopefully the server will have finished the initial install by the time I've eaten my sandwiches.
. . . .
OK, so Windows 2003 is now installed and running as a terminal server. MySQL (and the tools) are installed, so it's time to get on and install Merak itself.
. . . .
Well, installing MySQL was nice and straight-forward. It was an object lesson in clicking Next, Next, Finshed. Installing the tools was just as easy. The only small gotcha with it is to remember that by default you must connect to the databases via localhost rather than by the machine name.
Installing Merak is pretty straight foward too. During install you get two choices - Easy and Advanced. The easy option installs the Access DB backend and is recommended for 100 users or less. For any more than this you should use the advanced option and then select the required backend. And it does support plenty of them too. We chose the MySQL backend, entered our login details, realised that we had to create a blank schema in MySQL for Merak to create its tables in, and then let the installer do its job. Finally we added our administrator account and set up the mail domain.
So far, so good. Now to play with the server and see what it can do.
. . . . Later . . . .
That took some getting going. In fact, even though it isn't documented it took a reboot before any of the mail accounts could be accessed.
The web admin tools seem nice enough, and the web mail client is pretty neat. In fact the default interface is nearly a clone of Outlook 2003 - and includes calendering functionality (which I can't get working yet).
I've been able to send emails OK - but not receive them yet. I'll have to double-check the MX records for the test domain.
(How far along is it?. . . . Still formatting C:.)
We've already bought it - but this is just to get a bit of experience before the real install once the license / server hardware arrives.
One thing that surprised me is that it doesn't have it's own database backend - instead it relies upon either an Access .MDB file (yuk!) or an external database. For me it's a toss-up between MySQL and Microsoft SQL Express. As the price is the same for both (free) and seeing as I already run SQL Server 2000 servers here then the obvious choice is SQL Express.
Dear reader, don't take this as a slight against Open Source. I really like Open Source products. I run Linux at home as my main OS and have done for around five years now, but at work - well, standardisation is king. This is also because I won't be the only person maintaining this and, well, Microsoft's SQL Server (and Express too) have very good management tools. Yes, MySQL is getting better, but it isn't there yet.
(Copying files. . . .)
So on to Merak. Not a particularly well known product, at least, I've never heard of it before now. One of it's selling points is that it fits in well with Exchange clients, supports shared calendars, has loads of plugins to extend the functionality of the server, and it is a damn site cheaper than Exchange. It is also cheaper to add additional user licenses to it. Apparently we've bought 1000 user licenses for this.
(Please wait. . . Oh, we've rebooted. Hang on a tick, I'd better get the rest of the install under way.)
Merak can run on either Linux or Windows. It looks like it supports most of the major Linux distros. As we are integrating this into our Active Domain structure we're having to use Windows Server 2003.
("Setup will complete in 39 minutes". Yeah, sure it will.)
All the files are available on the Merak website, and will run quite happily for 30 days before you have to register it. Once you give it your license key then the demo becomes the full, unrestricted version.
(Adding the machine details. One question. Which berk decided to make Tijuana the default time zone for Windows installs?)
Once the initial server install is done, then I'll install SQL Server Express. I've not had chance to play with this yet, so if it turns out to be crap then I'll switch over the MySQL. Hopefully it won't come to that. Let's have a look at what it provides, while I'm waiting for the server install to finish.
. . . .
Scratch that, we're going to have to use MySQL. The limits on the database size and number of processors would cripple the mail server. Thank you Microsoft.
("Installing start menu items. Setup will complete in approximately 19 minutes". Liar. )
Right, I'm off to lunch now. Hopefully the server will have finished the initial install by the time I've eaten my sandwiches.
. . . .
OK, so Windows 2003 is now installed and running as a terminal server. MySQL (and the tools) are installed, so it's time to get on and install Merak itself.
. . . .
Well, installing MySQL was nice and straight-forward. It was an object lesson in clicking Next, Next, Finshed. Installing the tools was just as easy. The only small gotcha with it is to remember that by default you must connect to the databases via localhost rather than by the machine name.
Installing Merak is pretty straight foward too. During install you get two choices - Easy and Advanced. The easy option installs the Access DB backend and is recommended for 100 users or less. For any more than this you should use the advanced option and then select the required backend. And it does support plenty of them too. We chose the MySQL backend, entered our login details, realised that we had to create a blank schema in MySQL for Merak to create its tables in, and then let the installer do its job. Finally we added our administrator account and set up the mail domain.
So far, so good. Now to play with the server and see what it can do.
. . . . Later . . . .
That took some getting going. In fact, even though it isn't documented it took a reboot before any of the mail accounts could be accessed.
The web admin tools seem nice enough, and the web mail client is pretty neat. In fact the default interface is nearly a clone of Outlook 2003 - and includes calendering functionality (which I can't get working yet).
I've been able to send emails OK - but not receive them yet. I'll have to double-check the MX records for the test domain.
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