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Countdown To Phil's Birthday --
Countdown To Phil's Birthday --
First I guess I should apologize for not posting anything in the past week here! I really hate it when I have to ignore my own blog for more important admin business elsewhere. The good thing is, I always manage to learn a lot of new stuff that I can easily share 
Over the past week, I got a new server to host Microsoft Exchange which is a powerful email server from Microsoft. Before you go all crazy on Microsoft (I know I typically do), Exchange is one of the few excellent products they make. I am actually very hard pressed to find anything that compares to it that is open source and can easily run on Linux which 99% of my hosting business up until now has ran off from. Man, I never thought that I would say that 
So the first logical question is, why move your email to exchange? As you know, I’ve had 1and1 mailxchange now for quite some time. I really wanted a solution that would sync my calendar, contacts, tasks, files, and email to every device I use on a daily basis. Mailxchange was that solution but there are many problems. First the web client is very slow, sure its flashy, but it takes 5 minutes to load on my connection (that is fairly fast). I don’t have the time to wait on this client to load. The next problem is it needs custom software to connect to Outlook and Mobile Devices, I’m not into installing “connectors” to software when it has functionality built in with other products. Perhaps one of my biggest problems is the level of support I’ve gotten from 1and1. My mail has gone down on a few occasions and I’ve been unable to easily send a support ticket in asking what is wrong. I’m not even sure if 1and1 backs up my email and I have no method of backup, so I’m kind of stuck if they go down or don’t back up the server. Its kind of scary actually since I save all of my email.
So about 2 weeks ago, I started talking to a few friends. I know that I get a free msdn copy of Microsoft Exchange 2003 and Server 2003 from my University. I figured if I could find a few friends who were interested in small mailboxes on exchange, I could cover the cost for the hardware to host my copies of this software. I figured that I could host 4 people and handle a server that costs $25 a month from 3dgwebhosting which I’ve had in the past and they run excellent hosting on Windows server 2003. They cover the license cost, so I’d only be covering exchange. The downfall was I would only have 10GB to work with which isn’t a lot for email and backups. Because of this, I looked for alternate hosting. I decided that if I could find xen hosting, xen would support Windows.
About this time when I was looking, I knew that http://fsckvps.com who is a child company of vaserv in England hosted xen vps machines. I went to that site to look up their support email and found out about the horrible hypervm owner hanging and they were down. Anxious to get this hosting off the ground, I began looking at alternate places for hosting. Shortly after, I found good reviews on other blogs of a new hosting company called Elite Data Hosting. I contacted them about a 10mbps plan to host exchange on and they got an account for me on a xen vps using my server key. I’m basically paying $15 a month for ~325MB of ram and 30GB of hard disk space. The server is a high end server and I have had no complaints. They even took the time to install Windows for me from my disk!
Elite Data Hosting is good news for me because I now can have my 2 guaranteed friends and myself have a guaranteed 5GB of space for files / mailboxes a piece. It will also be very easy to automate backups of these mailboxes. We all split the $5 a month cost for the server so I’m basically paying what I would be paying 1and1 but I control my backups and have a better piece of mind.
So now I started the daunting task of setting up the Exchange server. Normally with Microsoft products, it takes about 5 seconds and about 10 clicks of the next button to install software and another 3 minutes to say configure this software to do this. By that point, everything normally works flawlessly (except for the occasional crashes of Microsoft Windows). On linux, there is always a lot of configuration, but linux always works without the crashes and instability. Perhaps this is the way to tell what is good and bad???
To get back to Exchange, I must say, this is the hardest piece of software I have ever had to install on both Linux and Windows. Part of the reason is the way Exchange relies on existing Server 2003 infustructure to improve itself. I’m not so sure if I’d rely on a Windows Server operating system, but I really have no choice with Exchange. Exchange requires Active Directory among other server features to run correctly and the prerequisite list is a nightmare to get through in less than 5 hours if you ask me. I started with a clean server a week from last Tuesday and didn’t get Exchange running until about Monday and I had 8 hours a day into it at the very least. I will take part of the blame for not knowing what I was doing past Active Directory configuration, but Exchange was no day at the beach to figure out. I also had a lot of errors that I spent hours reading about to find simple fixes. Finally after all of the struggle, I got exchange fully working to the point where I wanted it about 2 days ago. During my struggle, I posted a lot about my solutions on Admin Reference which is my site where I post solutions to all of my problems. I picture it as another *free* experts exchange but more tutorial based than question based. Maybe some day it will do a little of both That is my goal anyways!
One side note that I should add is, when I first loaded Outlook Web Access, I got a crappy looking interface. I found out quickly that Exchange only supports Internet Explorer in its premium interface (the one that looks nice and loads quick). Sadly, this is the only reason why I have opened Internet Explorer, and I have found that Firefox can open an IE tab, so I’ve began using that. I will also likely find a solution when I migrate completely to Linux (my next upcoming project).
So now that Exchange works, what was so difficult? Most of my difficulty was from I never managed an exchange server in the past, and I couldn’t find any decent documentation on how to do it. That is why I posted a lot to Admin Reference unlike I normally would. My biggest issue was the domain errors which were caused by firewalls and figuring out how to get Outlook Web Access and Outlook Mobile Access working with SSL encryption. I also was not prepared to spend money on an SSL certificate (required by exchange) and provide antivirus / spam scanning to the server. I was under the impression that spam/virus protection was built in, but it isn’t, and the freeware gfi version is no longer free. I figured out how to migrate linux spamassassin to the server and that is adequate for spam protection
One last question that I should cover is why didn’t I go with Exchange 2007? I will admit that Exchange 2007 is very nice software, but there are a few problems:
All in all, I figure I am paying about $200 bucks total for my new email solution, but my friends really do help cut the cost down to where I can happily afford it. I still have 1 slot open but have a feeling that will be closed before long. For a private email server, I consider it an excellent learning experience, and a good way to get some good content on Admin Reference! Hopefully you got some helpful tips out of this.
One final note: I’d like to put a plug out there to any other system admins. If you are like me, you are always running into new problems that don’t have easy solutions. Why not take a few minutes when you find the answer and post it to Admin Reference? Maybe someday you will look back on it (I know I have) and say thats how to fix it! Someday when it gets a little more material, I plan on integrating the forum into a wiki that is easily searachable for solutions to problems.
Tags: 1and1, 3dgwebhosting, active directory, Admin Reference, administration, Elite data hosting, email, exchange, exchange 2003, Exchange 2007, fsckvps, mailxchange, Microsoft, Microsoft Exchange, mobile, outlook, outlook web access, owa, server 2003, vaserv, vps, windows
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Mobile Technology, My Site
Nice entry and I’m a bit surprised to hear you talk so kindly about a M$ product since you usually like to bad mouth it. Looks like you put a great amount of work and time on this project but I’m glad it all worked out.
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Cool!