Back On The Saddle Again

So it's been a while since I have updated my blog. So what have I been up to lately? Well I have been working with several new clients and new Ubuntu installs.

I just recently oversaw the conversion of an Microsoft Exchange installation.
We replaced Windows 2003 Enterprise server running Exchange 2003 with Ubuntu running Citadel. Total users: 523.

After running the prototype email service over the course of 6 weeks with a small subset of the company's employees we moved onto production in mid June.

The total conversion of 523 users took approximately two weeks. Part of the quick conversion was the fact that the client did not have to replace Microsoft Office. Once the server was setup, our technical support team just had to change Outlook settings on all the user's profiles. Approximately 36 hours to backup all the users email data and transfer to new host and approximately 15 minutes per user. We also spent three days working out the Push technology in Citadel to connect it to their blackberrys and PDAS which required us to setup the SMS gateway.

The system has been online for four weeks now and the following statistically data was data-mined by the client.

20% less false positives when sending and receiving
38.5 % less spam

The client also reports that the email system seems faster. Moving in and out of their individual folders has become instant.

The only con was the generic webmail interface when compared to the OWL interface provided by Exchange. To combat this we install apache and setup RoundCube Webmail and designed a new CSS template with customized company logos, etc. Roundcube has alot of AJAX goodness to it. With some customization it looks and acts like Gmail or Yahoo.

Needless to say they are happy. They are planning on converting the now obsolete Exchange server into a fileserver sometime in the future.

We are finishing up with setting up an RSync server to pull the actual data folders containing each users email. This way we have a live daily backup of the user's personal email, contacts, etc. The Rsync server will also be Ubuntu.

It is important to also note that new server is actually running on slightly less hardware than the Exchange server was. In fact, each of these servers are virtual machines running on 4 separate pieces of hardware all replicating to backup vm servers. Any one of them can go down and load balancing changes points the clients to the backup server. Host VM server is also running Ubuntu and VMWARE server. Part of the initial requirements was redundancy. The client in the past relied on the one Exchange server for the entire domain with just a bounce back service provided by their ISP.

Over the next couple weeks I will drop off the email project and begin converting their firewalls from Microsoft ISA to a Linux firewall called Endian. I have had great success with it and it allows much more control over your incoming and outgoing protocols than Microsoft ISA. Part of the initial requirement is that several of the firewalls need to support VPN tunneling as well as multiple WAN and VLAN support. I showcased Endian to the client and highlighted not only the functional improvements switching to Endian but also relayed the fact that Endian allows protocol priority, packet shaping, automatic Proxy filtering, etc.