Email

Google Apps

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I remember when Howard & Gus were talking up Gmail when it came out. A gig of storage for life free they said. It was a closed beta so you had to have friends who had an in get you an invite. In a short period of time (shorter than I expected) I had an invite. I was like why do I need this? I want and use my own domain’s personal email. Why would I want @gmail.com in my address? I mean the idea was very interesting but I didn’t think it was for me.

Not too much time went by and people were still talking about Gmail. I figured I need to use my invite so I can at least secure the username that I like to use, so I did. As predicted I haven’t used Gmail that much. I do route mail to it that I don’t want in my regular mailbox’s, but I could go weeks without logging into the account. That was until a month or so ago.

Recently Google offered Google Apps for free. Google Apps is a collection of web applications that you can use with your own domain. They have cool features like Google Talk, Calendar, etc. What got me interested was Gmail. Now they offer a Gmail front end that you can use for your own mail domain. Better yet it is free for personal use. I get 100 accounts with as of this writing 5.8 gigs of space. Now this information on its own would be interesting but nothing more. In fact when I first read about Google Apps I setup a mail domain pointing to the system and played around with it, but nothing more. I like to get my mail via IMAP, and Google didn’t offer that. The final clincher for me was when they announced that Google Apps would support IMAP, also for free. For the past week I have been routing some mail to my domain I had them hosting mail for, and so far I haven’t had any hiccups (fingers crossed). Because of that I am beginning the task of routing all my mail to Google Apps.

I can be a cynic. I know that, but I am very impressed by how this tool has evolved. I am even eying the Premier version of the service to get some of the more advanced features. I am not sure if I need them so the free service is fine for now. It is just too bad that I wasted some money moving to a new email hosting provider in September. They are great, but they can’t compete with 5gigs free IMAP storage.

Mail Server

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We have been having a problem with one of our Mail servers. It is the machine that holds a bunch of small domains we own, and our call center mail system. It wont allow us to log into terminal server. VNC keeps crashing, and LDAP doesn’t start. It serves up mail fine though. We have had this issue for a week or so. We have been trying to figure out the problem without causing more issues.

I finally broke down and configured the replacement box today. We put the new hardware up at our data center on Tuesday but had not had a chance to cut all the mail over onto it. I configured Imail, moved the mailbox’s and domains. All but our biggest domain is now cut over. Everything looks normal so far. I will cut the remaining domain over when our call center closes tonight. hopefully everything will go smooth. I should just need to update the MX record, and sync the mail. All the accounts are created, and copies of the mailbox’s are on there from a snapshot a few hours ago.

Keeping my fingers crossed!!!

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If I thought I Was Busy Before

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If I thought I was busy at work before, I am in way over my head now. One of the guys on my team left yesterday. We are now short handed. The big problem is the small issues now slowing down getting the bigger projects done.

I have 1 Windows 2003 Server with Active directory done for our nyc office. it is already in production. I need to finish moving stuff off one other server and then move the AD roles to the 2k3 server. Then I can rebuild the other box, and move on in the upgrade cycle.

A major web site for a customer of ours is launching tonight. Thankfully it didn’t require too much time on my teams part, but it ate up resources.

As I mentioned before I am also trying to merge our mail systems for 1 department. I have 2 call centers who are supposed to interact with each other, but they are on 2 different mail systems. We are going to merge our NYC call center people with our Kingston mail system, since the kingston system is newer and it is cheaper to maintain. Then when that is done we will have all our call center people on one mail system and the remainder of the company on another. The good news is the new mail system (Imail 8.0) is awesome. I have been a fan of Imail for years, since like version 5.0 I think. I never used it at work, but have at home or when I hosted my site with someone. So far I am very happy with it.

Upgrades Galore

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Over the past few days I have completed building my first Windows 2003 Domain Controller for our NYC office. Last night I moved a few DHCP scopes onto it. I will finish that this weekend. I also moved our callcenter mail server to our data center. It completes my migration to IMail 8.0. It is a nice little mail program. Next up is moving NYC call center people to this mail server. That requires changing their email address’. No one will be happy about that. I am working on a migration plan now.

I also need to learn more about rsync. We are going to use it for some new things starting soon.

Busy At Work, What Else Is New

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Work this week has been challenging. I got nothing I planned on doing yesterday completed. I was busy fixing other issue that crept up. Kai from our Kingston office was down for a meeting and also to just work for a day out of NY. He never did that before so we wanted to bring him down.

We are in the midst of several major projects. Remote recording of voice calls, creating a beta test for remote agents, move a mail server, upgrade NYC’s domain controllers, evaluate SMS, build a new service domain, and oh yeah we had 4 people get hired in the past week. My team is just a bit busy. Don’t get me wrong, busy is good. Overwhelmed is not. We are currently busy but quickly moving to overwhelmed. Hopefully we can get everything done without a problem.

Still No Exchange

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I stayed up late last night working on getting Exchange 2003 to work correctly. So far I have not succeeded. Howard put me in touch with David at idealab. He has done the deployment before and he was very helpful. Thanks to him I have an idea of what needs to be done. I went through all the documentation he sent me. I got further along in the process than I did before, but still nothing. I am now going over all my settings to verify I did everything correctly. so far it looks like I have done everything expected of me. I am getting frustrated with being unable to get this to work. I have a few more things to try tonight when I get home.

The Holy Grail

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The holy grail for me the past 4 days has been configuring Exchange 2003 to use RPC over HTTP and getting it to work. So far nothing. I have gotten 2 exchange servers to work, but I need to be on the LAN in order to get mail via outlook 2003. I can use the web interface but that isn’t good enough. I can use a vpn connection, and that wont work either. I am so close but it still wont work.

I would like to thank Microsoft for their totally lack of a support selection on this topic. I have all 3 documents regarding the topic printed out. they barely mention how to install the dam service. You would think that would be an important part of the process.

I am just burnt out right now. I have been taking all of my spare time this weekend to get this to work. I am just frustrated because I am so close to getting it to work.

Exchange 2003

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I finally got around to installing Exchange 2003 on a machine at home. I wanted to test it out somewhere and I didn’t find time at work, so I did it at home. I got it to work after I rebuilt my 2003 server. I need to test the RPC over HTTP option when I goto work monday. It works fine on the same LAN.

If it works out ok, I will put one at work for extensive testing.

This entry was written while listening to Personal Holoway by Bush

Other Projects

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Other things I am trying to work on are… I just downloaded Connectix (now Microsoft’s) Virtual PC for Windows. I want to see if it is better than VMWare. It was up on MSDN so I decided to give it a try. I also grabbed the beta for SMS 2003. Gets me wondering when they will release it since 2003 is almost up.

My exchange project is not dead yet, but I have no time to do anything on it, so it sits idle. I am also looking at the new Microsoft Chat Server. We currently use a Jabber server from Tipic. I actually like it allot and it was very cheap. I want to see how the Microsoft one measures up.

Besides projects to evaluate new software I am also working on tons of other stuff. I am scheduling an update to our email ticketing system called Mailflow. We currently use version 1.0 and are getting a free upgrade to 2.0. I am attempting to deploy it next week. It is from a company called Visnetic. They make some neat pieces of software.

To conserve bandwidth we are about to start blocking most outbound network ports from our firewall. That will make me a popular guy with the rest of the company! Also we are ordering a private line T-1 between our two offices so we can send VOIP calls between them in greater number than we can over the internet T-1’s we have.

Old Gear & New Gear

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I just got a new server in. We are building a Data Warehouse running on SQL 2000. We built one to demo and everyone liked it we have been using it for 4 months on a desktop with allot of hard drive space. The “server” finally showed its desktop limitations, so we are upgrading it to a Dual Xeon 2.4 Ghz server. We are doing IDE RAID, and threw in 2 gigs of ram. For just around 2K it is a nice little box. If you don’t need SCSI you can get server gear cheap now a days. Our dumb-ass vendor forgot to ship us a CD-ROM / Floppy Drive so I have the box open on the floor of my office with a desktop CD Drive and Floppy drive plugged in trying to get Windows 2000 installed. We have been buying Windows 2003 Server since it came out, but for most applications we are just downgrading to Windows 2000 Server. So far today I had no luck getting the OS to install. I think the USB floppy drive I used wasn’t working correctly. I need to cannibalize a floppy drive or buy one for $12 or whatever they are going for these days.

We have some older desktops that we were using as Red Hat web servers that we consolidated to one box. That means I have 2 box’s to use for testing and such. I am trying to demo Exchange 2003 on one and put Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition on the other. Terminal server will not boot off the dam CD from MSDN. The boot disks we have for it wont work either. I am continuing to work on that. I may give up on NT 4.0 and try 2000 server in application mode. I don’t need it for more than 30 days so I should have no problem with the demo mode it makes you use if you don’t have a key code.

As for Exchange 2003, we are looking to see if it is something we may want to move to. For maybe just the Technology department or for the company as a whole. Howard said good things about Outlook 2003 over HTTP. He said it was fast. I am going to look at how Idealab! did their deployment and maybe segment some users onto Exchange for a trial. Not sure yet.