Sysadmin

(LinuxWorld) -- Caldera's Volution Messaging Server 1.0 allows system administrators to support different e-mail and collaboration clients, including Microsoft Outlook, on a Linux server. This avoids the use of a Windows 2000 or NT server, and buying licenses for Exchange. I tested Volution to see if it lived up to its promises in ease of administration, and, unfortunately, found it lacking in one key area.

According to the Volution Messaging Server documentation, OpenUnix 8 or OpenLinux 3.1 was required for the installation. Real Linux users know this is complete marketing smoke, but hey, I can't blame Caldera for trying. If the software will install on Caldera, it most likely will, without much effort, install on Red Hat, SuSE, and Mandrake as well. (A spokesperson says Caldera has not tested or certified it on other versions of Linux.) To stick to the stated requirements, however, I installed Volution on a Caldera machine.

I hadn't installed a Caldera distribution of Linux in years. In fact, now that I think back on it, the last time I installed a Caldera distro the company was flaunting its work with Red Hat, and the desktop was Spyglass. In the meantime, I had read of Caldera's new-fangled installation tool named LIZARD.

I installed Caldera OpenLinux 3.1 on a PII-300 with 256 megabytes of RAM. LIZARD is the easiest-to-use installer I have seen. I chose a standard installation, which required no post-installation tinkering. There are a couple of noteworthy things LIZARD does well that makes other Linux installers look amateurish:

1. LIZARD starts copying packages as soon as you select the type of installation. While the packages are installing in the background you get to finish the initial configuration questionnaire. (If Linux is multitasking, why aren't all installation programs?)
2. If you finish the initial configuration before the installation is complete, the installer starts Solitaire to amuse you while you wait. (I beat it in the first game.)
3. You do not need to reboot when the installation is complete! The system, when finished installing, fires up KDE immediately. No rebooting, no please remove your CD, no muss or fuss.

Gushing about the OpenLinux installation aside, the system appears clean and well designed. Even the online update worked flawlessly. I did not spend that much time in OpenLinux, though, as I really wanted to get Volution Messaging Server up and running.

Linux messaging history lesson

Modern messaging and collaboration for Linux has always been a vaporous promise of the distant future. Until just a couple of weeks ago with the release of Ximian Evolution 1.0, Linux users didn't have a real collaboration client that rivaled Microsoft Outlook in functionality.

Linux has collaboration servers, including OpenMail and Lotus Notes, but both have significant drawbacks. The most important is a lack of stable Outlook support. Like it or not, without reliable Outlook support, most companies won't touch a server. The second was price. Although OpenMail is priced attractively for smaller companies, I learned from painful experience OpenMail is difficult to deploy and manage.

There is a plethora of Web-based e-mail tools. Aside from checking my e-mail when I am on the road, or at a friend's house, I don't like Web-based e-mail tools for daily use, and don't think it's fair to ask users to put up with them either. Give me a friendly, flexible, fast, reliable e-mail client!

Volution in the middle

Volution Messaging Server provides a nice middle ground. It does not include an e-mail client, but for $899 you get the promise of Outlook calendaring compatibility and a 25-user license.

Below is a run-down of what software makes up Caldera Volution Messaging Server:

• Postfix MTA
• Cyrus Message Store System
• Cyrus POP and IMAP servers
• OpenLDAP
• IMP HTML e-mail client
• OpenUnix or OpenLinux required

Volution is not alone in the message server market. Bynari has been offering its server for several years. Bynari Insight Client/Server Groupware includes:

• Exim MTA
• Cyrus Message Store System
• Cyrus Pop and IMAP servers
• OpenLDAP
• Insight Linux e-mail client

Insight costs $499 for 100 users.

I bring up Bynari because it is one of the little guys that has been doing this for a long time. I believe Bynari deserves recognition for deploying that product with real customers, such as the city of Largo, Florida. Bynari also appears to offer a more attractive price point.

Volution installation

Installing Volution is simple. I just popped in the CD and OpenLinux asked me if I wanted to run install.sh immediately, which is a nice touch. The installation continued forward, informed me what packages it was removing (sendmail, and a couple of others), and then informed me of what it was installing. After the installation, there is a quick opening of a Web browser pointed at http://localhost/msg and you are off and configuring.

When you first login as the administrator (admin/admin), the Web site appeared to be broken. This is because, although the default desktop for Caldera OpenLinux is KDE 2.1, Caldera does not make its HTML for the Volution Messaging Server valid for the KDE Web browser, Konqueror 2.1. I checked the admin page with Konqueror 2.2, which is the current version and it works fine. After firing up the good old standby Netscape 4.7, I was able to enter Volution Messaging Server's administration area.

Open communications to a Web server can be snooped, so it's important for an administrator to communicate with a server using an encrypted connection, such as one using SSL. As a default, Caldera does not have you log in via a secure interface. The documentation suggests using an http URL instead of https. As an experiment, I logged into the admin area using an https URL, which uses SSL, and it worked fine. For inexperienced system administrators, which are logical customers for Volution Messaging Server, this is a large oversight. Fortunately, the fix for Caldera is easy -- change the documentation. (A Caldera product manager said this is in the works.)

Security blunder aside, the administration of the software was simple. Simple as in: how-do-I-breathe simple. I was stunned. A long time ago, I reviewed Sendmail Pro from Sendmail, Inc. and thought that its configuration was easy. Caldera appears to make managing a mail/directory server child's play.

The software supports multiple domains and aliases. It is also completely integrated. If I add a mail user, that user exists in the directory automatically. Another item of note is that if you add a user to the mail system, it does not add it to the underlying operating system. Don't worry, the user doesn't need to exist in the underlying operating system for the user to receive mail, which is the default in sendmail. This is a nice advantage of the Cyrus IMAP server and LDAP: It is completely self-contained.

After I added a couple of users, I easily added the directory server to my address sources within Evolution (thus, having a centralized address book for a small company, just like Microsoft Exchange). However, Evolution isn't our test platform. The question is, how well does it work with Outlook?

Looking after Outlook

The main concern here is the Outlook Calendar. Outlook users can rely on the included LDAP for a shared address book, but every business person I know -- particularly supervisors -- just have to have the ability to know everything their underlings are doing. What's the easiest way to do that? Mandate that the company-wide calendar is Outlook.

Volution's documentation was clear up to this point. The documentation states, "The Messaging Server provides the Outlook Configuration tool, which supports the configuration of Messaging Server add-in functionality in these mail clients." It goes on to list the versions of Microsoft Outlook it supports. The one item Caldera forgets to explain is where to actually get the files, tool, or configuration that allows Outlook support. The files are not on the CD.

I searched Caldera's Web site for the answer. Sure enough, Caldera offers a late news Web page (see the resources below) that mentions where to find the configuration tool. Interestingly, the Web page explains the procedure incorrectly, but offers enough information for a clever system administrator to figure out a plausible solution. My guess was that I needed to FTP to your Volution server, log in as anonymous, cd to pub/clientconfig, and download all files contained therein to the client. (Or so I thought.)

Since I run an all-Linux shop, I borrowed a brand-new PC running Windows XP, and (almost automatically thanks to Microsoft's bundling) a copy of Outlook 2002/XP. I installed the clientconfig on the borrowed PC, reviewed the instructions, executed the client configuration, started Outlook and voila, nothing worked.

Okay, two things worked. I could send and receive e-mail.

I called Caldera and spoke with a helpful person in technical support. It turns out that the Outlook configurator is designed to be much easier to use than I surmised. The proper use of the tool is thus: On the PC, fire-up a Web browser and log into the administration server. Go to the configurator button, which is a hyperlink, click on it, and that's it. Clicking on the configurator downloads a Windows Visual Basic file that goes through Outlook and configures it automatically. At this point, all the user needs to do is type in their password into Outlook, and click on the "share freetime information" in the calendar preferences file.

I went through these steps to no avail. The configurator did not configure my free/busy information, and therefore I could not share my Outlook appointments. I tried un-installing, re-installing, manually extracting the cab files, praying to various deities, but nothing worked.

Alas, after three hours on the telephone with Caldera's technical support people, we were unable to get my configuration (Windows XP and Outlook 2002/XP) to work correctly with the Messaging Server. Caldera's support people told me the company has Windows XP and Outlook XP working in-house, but were unable to tell me the exact steps needed to get my configuration up and running.

After further investigation, we found that my problems with OutLook 2002 were actually due to a bug in Outlook 2002/XP (imagine that). Microsoft, according to Caldera, offers no ETA on when this bug will be fixed completely, although Microsoft did tell Caldera that the first XP service pack will fix the bug in some cases. Earlier version of Oulook work fine with Volution, Caldera assures me, although due to my site's Linux purity (or Windows deficiency, depending on your perspective) I was unable to test Outlook on Microsoft's six other Windows distros.

Final analysis

I did not have a difficult configuration, as both the client PC and server were fresh installations, and the free/busy portion of the product should have worked out of the box. Caldera obviously went through a lot of trouble to make sure the server is well integrated, easy to install, and a snap to administer. Althought the free/busy bug wasn't Caldera's fault it is something Caldera should have caught during its quality assurance testing. I believe Volution requires more compatibility and installation testing and more thorough documentation before I can recommend it wholeheartedly.

Volution Messaging Server provides an adequate e-mail server. The integrated directory service is nice, and for some sites, the Web-based e-mail will be beneficial. However, the software does not appear to offer anything over the Bynari Insight, and the price for Volution Messaging Server is much more than the similar Insight. It's troubling that Caldera specifically excludes Red Hat and SuSE in its compatibility lists for Volution Messaging Server. Yes, Red Hat, Mandrake, and SuSE are competitors, but these distributions have the lion's share of the market today. Not supporting them strikes me as either shortsighted or proprietary.

That said, I am not biased against Caldera. I respect Caldera's business savvy and energetic and successful attempt to make administration easier. I also get a real thrill when I think about what Caldera may pull off with the integration of OpenUnix (previously UnixWare) and Linux.