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:

• My first issue would be, Exchange 2007 is really bloated.  If you compare the 2003 to 2007 installation disks, the 2003 install disk is about 300MB, the 2007 version is closer to 1.7GB.  That is a huge difference, one that I’m not willing to upgrade for.
• My next issue is due to the bloat, I would need a much powerful server.  I could upgrade to the 600MB RAM server plan with a 50GB hard disk or so for 30 dollars a month, but then I would have to start hosting more mailboxes than I’d want to to cover the costs, and I’m not really into that idea.  I might upgrade for 2003 if people are interested and it won’t take too many server resources or hurt my rigged spam fighting solution, but that is a decision that I’d rather not make now since it works perfectly as is!
• My final issue is, newer software normally sucks.  I always wait for at least Service Pack 1 (2 if possible) until I start using a product mainstream.  Exchange 2003 is at SP2 while Exchange 2007 is at SP1.  With other Microsoft software, I’ve found that when I compare a fresh install of Server 2003 to Server 2008: Microsoft Server 2003 with a GUI (Graphical User Interface or your windows desktop) uses 400MB on a new install, while the Microsoft Server 2008 Core Edition (no desktop, strictly command line to reduce bloat) uses 800MB on a new install with nothing configured.  This is a huge jump and I have a feeling that Exchange 2003-2007 will be very similar (the requirements for 2003 is 256MB of ram, 2007: 2GB of ram).  BIG DIFFERENCE, huh!

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.

LxLabs develops the best control panel for OpenVZ/Xen which is a virtualization platform for hosting many servers on one physical server.  HyperVM allows clients to control their server by enabling power control, operating system reinstallations, and charts for server status.

A major users of HyperVM is cheapvps.co.uk (a2b2, vaserv, fsckvps) which I would estimate hosts at least 5000 vps clients at the very least and I’m underestimating.  They provide very cheap hosting and I did host with them for quite some time as a backup solution.  I then found space on a friends server and didn’t need them any longer (I’d say about 2 months ago).    To get back to vaserv, Their company took a big hit when a vulnerability was released (and as I understand it) was not fixed until 2 weeks after LxLabs was notified.  Anyways, their entire service was hacked and most of their data was lost.  I feel sorry for those who didn’t backup their vps regularly.

Back in the day when I was using LxLabs software: hypervm and lxadmin (which is like cpanel), the owner was very nice to help me with every problem I had.  Eventually I made the move to cpanel because there was always some kind of problem popping up and I needed something much more stable and proven at the time.  Cpanel did fix all of my woes.

Anyways, I bet there was a lot of pressure on the owner from everyone.  VAserv still isn’t back up fully and it has been 4 days now.  I really feel sorry for their staff.  They must be losing a lot of money because of this 1 tiny hack.  I can sort of see why the owner would kill himself over this, but because of his death, the programming community has lost a brilliant programmer.  In addition, the VPS industry has lost a source of cheap, powerful software, so vps prices will likely rise in the near future if the legacy of hypervm isn’t carried on.

One final note on this, as a result of this, I hope the programming community realizes that updates are extremely important both for the developer and the client.  I also cannot stress enough that proper backups should be made often and verified for redundancy!  I will be verifying my backups later today

So you may be wondering, how did I find out?  I have been looking at a vps server to host exchange 2003 or a similar email solution for mobile sync (to get away from the heavy ajax interface of mailxchange at 1and1 plus have control over my backups).  I went to cheapvps and they were down, then I checked vaserv and found out that way.  Because they have been down and I needed a server yesterday, I went with another provider who I might be reviewing in a couple of weeks or months

I wouldn’t believe it if anyone told me they’ve never heard of Google.  I’d also find it extremely difficult to believe that anyone hasn’t used Google ever or benefited from a google query.  Lets face it, Google owns the search industry!  Google also is very efficient at indexing the internet for quick searches.

In recent years, Google has released several new features including, but not limited to, gmail, google earth, google calendar, google docs, and google web toolkit.

I have not tried google docs, however have heard that their terms of service say that google can access your documents whenever they want.  I’m not sure how true this is, so I will say no more. (http://www.jordandelozier.com/2009/02/does-google-0wnz-your-soul/ verifies this).  However with storing private information anywhere on another service, you have to trust other people who have access to your account (administrators).  I’m not sure if I’d like to trust a free service with my documents, regardless of how popular they are, but thats just me.

As for the google web toolkit and google search, I use both often. I don’t think I could live without google search!  I submit a good 100 queries each day to google.   As for the google web tool kit, I love how it simplifies javascript into java.  This has helped me on numerous websites that I’ve developed.

As for google earth, I’ve tried that and it is impressive, however I don’t like the fact that it installs a program to my computer that then interfaces to an internet connection, therefore I’ve uninstalled it and haven’t used it since.

Gmail is also impressive, I tried GMail twice.  I thought that I could make it interface with imap and sync my email to every device I have.  Unfortunately, I found out the hard way that their IMAP sucks.  You cannot upload email to their servers via IMAP to a sent mail folder.  I also found that when using a text based client called pine, I couldn’t access the server due to unfamiliar directory names.  I also hate how they don’t allow unsecure access via IMAP.  I do however like their web interface.

Google calendar is also impressive, and I used this on one website that I created.  Google calendar however has a small problem with it, its embedded and you can’t customize the calendar all that much. It also uses a format that is different from the normal ICS file format so a calendar parser can’t quite parse the google ics files correctly, however this may have been fixed by now.

With mobile applications and google, gmail syncs to a smartphone correctly, however won’t syncronise tasks, calendar appointments and contacts effectively.  I found many bugs with the one software program that does exist to sync the calendar to my mobile phone.

After finding all these problems, I now pay for mailxchange from www.1and1.com.  I got my own domain and it syncs to everything perfectly.  It also provides me with standard ics files to power http://calendar.famousphil.com!   I’m sure that Microsoft Exchange can do this also, however I wasn’t about ready to pay for hosting on Exchange with the very small space allotments most hosts provide.

Because of the sync issues I’ve had and pine issues, I use 1and1′s mailxchange service, and they even provide a storage area like google docs!   I have also read their TOS and they will not release my personal email or documents unless a legal case comes up requiring they do it.  I trust their staff, probably because I pay for it.  Google should allow its customers to pay for services like syncing if you ask me.

Thats enough blabbing about Google   I like thier search and will likely always use google for all of my search needs.  Their mail on the other hand needs some work before I’d consider using it.