The two attached files are a sample checklist and a sample backup calculator to be used in conjunction with the talk I’m giving at MacSysAdmin, which has been moved up to 10:45 in the morning today.
-
-
Entourage Web Services Edition Available
For those who have been waiting for a time when Entourage uses less bandwidth, has enhanced support for EWS features and well, works better, the time has come. The beta came and went and we waiting. And the wait is now over. Entourage Web Services Edition is now available for download. You only really need this if you have an Exchange Server 2007 environment and can support EWS.
-
6TB of Hot Swappable Drives for $600
IcyDock makes a 4 port chassis for SATA drives that allows you to build your own RAID out of large and inexpensive drives. The resultant JBOD can then be formatted into RAID0 or RAID1 (software RAID) and presented to backup applications (ie – Retrospect) as offline storage. Amazon sells an IcyDock, populated with 1.5TB drives for a total of 6TB, which is how I’m now snapshotting my VMs in my lab. I’m also using it as the backup destination for my home Kerio server. Works nicely so far. You can also buy the IcyDock with no drives and likely populate them with 2TB drives, although I haven’t tested this yet…
-
iPhone and GroupWise
There is no built-in support for GroupWise on the iPhone. Apple supports a number of other services, but GroupWise has not been high on the priority list and honestly, I don’t know that it would be high on mine either… Having said that, it did pop up on my radar and I was able to find a couple of ways to achieve a good sync. The first is Entourage. You can use Entourage as a conduit to then grab information and sync it with GroupWise. This has a hopefully obvious disadvantage, which is that it does not synchronize wirelessly – you have to cradle sync to get the data onto…
-
Kerio Mail Server in 10 Minutes
The good people at Kerio have been kind enough to distribute their mail server software bundled into a CentOS installation on a Virtual Machine. You can just snap it into Fusion very easily, if you want to take the Kerio Mail Server (KMS) for a ride. I can’t say I would recommend running it full time in Fusion on Mac hardware though, you might be better served installing the package installer that Kerio distributes in that case.. There is a second nice thing about the VM in that it does most of the work in setting up Kerio for you. When you download and run the VM, it immediately fires…
-
Google Mail adds ActiveSync
Exchange/iPhone users, you’ve finally gotten the Google hookup. ActiveSync has been added to the Google repertoire allowing gmail users to sync their contacts and calendars in the same fashion that Exchange and Kerio users can, although mail will still need to go through IMAP, which is fairly straight forward to configure. This means that Google Mail is finally in serious competition with a few other players in the messaging market. At this point, Google has finally knocked down one of the serious barriers I had with gmail adoption for companies. I am glad to see that they realize (and I’m sure have realized but just got the kinks worked out)…
-
Kerio
Ever wonder if there’s something else out there other than Exchange? Well, if you are a company with less than 400 accounts and you don’t need some of the more advanced features of Exchange, like site replication then Kerio might just be the app for you: http://www.kerio.com
-
Kerio: Out of Office Message
To setup an Out of Office message with Kerio Mail Server, log into the web portal to access your mail. Then click on Settings and select Out of Office. Move the bulleted option to I am out of office now and then type in the our of office message you’d like to use. When finished, click on the OK button.
-
Kerio: Permissions
Sometimes when you’re setting up permissions for certain folders using Microsoft Entourage, the process will fail. If it does you can still set permissions using the web portal. To do so, log into your webmail. Then control-click the folder in question and click on the Access Rights… button. Here, you will be able to define who can read, write or delete items. Make sure that if you’re giving someone access to a folder that you don’t forget to give access to the parent folder (eg – the parent folder to INBOX is the root of your email hierarchy). This is one of the more common mistakes we see there.
-
Blocking Spam Attacks
Various Spam Issues and the Appropriate Steps to Resolve Them: Symptom: Users of the domain are getting a large amount of spam Problem: Spam sucks… Resolution: Outsource spam to MXLogic, Postini, Katharion, etc., limit incoming traffic over port 25 to the IP scheme of the outsourced service and use whatever form of message hygiene is built into the server for a layered approach (eg – Intelligent Messaging Filter in Exchange, Spam Assassin in Mac OS X Mail Server, Kerio Spam rules, etc. Symptom: An IP or domain name is getting flagged as being a spammer although the users do not send spam. Problem: The mail server potentially does…