Back to Newsletters KEYWORDS=apache, fasttrack, officemail, progress, database, mfgpro, DAVROM CONSULTING Newsletter - Issue # 21 - Dated: Thu Nov 13 15:09:57 EST 2003 From the desk of David Clark Don't be alarmed, the newsletter lives. Like I have said, I just don't want to send out a newsletter for the sake of it - I want it to be informative for you. Support trenches in the last two months: Upgrades of SCO servers to 5.0.6 and 5.0.7; setting up e-mail systems at various sites on SCO and Linux; Samba on UNIX/Linux replacing MS servers; some RAID systems have decided to have a drive or two die; install SCO 5.0.5 on newer hardware (drivers are fun)... and the beat goes on. I would like to thank the reader for their time in reading this newsletter. David.M.Clark UNIX Quote UNIX/Linux e-mail - It's virus free. SCO Unixware Office Mail Server We recently ran up a server in-house to check out SCO Office Mail Server 2.0 which runs on SCO Unixware 7.1.3. As you may recall from previous newsletters we have talked about this fully integrated e-mail server solution that allows a wide range of e-mail clients to connect to it such as Netscape Messenger, Kmail, MS Outlook Express and MS Outlook. SCO Office Mail Server also allows you to install and run MS Outlook connector clients which provide full calendar, contacts, journal, notes and task sharing as you would find with a MS Exchange server. The product box ships with a single user version of SCO Unixware 7.1.3, the Unixware Linux Kernel Personality, SCO Office Mail Server, 10 mailboxes and 10 MS Outlook connector licences. Installation is pretty simple and for those familiar with Unixware/OpenServer installation, it really is so easy. The next and perhaps the most impressive part for me was the Linux Kernel Personality. This is the mechanism that allows Linux apps to run on Unixware as if they were on a native Linux server. To invoke the Linux Kernel Personality you type "linux" at the command line and then you complete the installation of the SCO Office Mail Server part within this environment. Setting up users and e-mail domains is a snap as this is all done through a web browser interface - simply point your browser at the server and you can configure away - you are up in minutes after the installation is complete. Users can also browse the e-mail server and login via the web interface to set their holiday/away messages or modify their details - of course you can restrict this. SCO Office Mail Server also comes bundled with the IMP web based e-mail reader which allows users to read their e-mail on the server via their web browser. This is useful for reading e-mail from remote locations outside the office via the Internet or PPP dialin. Some more tech based info: - SCO Office Mail Server uses PostFix as its MTA (Mail Transfer Agent). - The users are not actually setup as UNIX or Linux login accounts, they are setup under the Mail system and have individual directories under the /var/spool/imap/user directory. - The mail folders themselves are in the form of subdirectories for example my personal folder is actually a directory called: /var/spool/imap/user/david/personal. Inside this directory are the individual e-mail message files as it uses cyrus format for message file storing. All in all an impressive product which is guaranteed to give rival e-mail servers a run for their money with the 10-user base pack (as above) retailing at around $1846 AUD. For more information on this product go to: www.sco.com/products/SCOoffice/mail/ DAVROM connecting you to the Internet Previously DAVROM has only been able to offer the technical skills and the devices to connect customers to the Internet (SnapGear, ePipe, ADSL modems). DAVROM has recently entered into an a agreement with Pacific Internet as an official Pacific Internet Partner and can now offer customers a complete range of Internet connectivity options for ADSL and other types of connections. How it works? You simply select the type of connection you require (ADSL, ISDN, modem dialup), we then sell you the associated products to facilitate the connection and we will handle the sign up and connection for you. This way we take the leg work out of getting you connected the the ISP. For more information on connecting to the Internet, please contact us. For more information about Pacific Internet, please visit: www.pacific.net.au Good News for Progress running on SCO OpenServer While I know of one customer who is running Progress on SCO OpenServer 5.0.7 there has been some reservations with Progress developing their product any further than Progress 9.1 on SCO OpenServer 5.0.6. This has meant that customers wanting features on later releases of Progress have had to either switch to SCO Unixware 7.1.x or go to Linux platforms. The issue has been the requirement of Progress 10 to have multithreading support in the OS and the next release of SCO OpenServer (code named "legend") will address this. With "Legend" addressing the multithreading issue it is hopeful that Progress 10 will be supported/endorsed on SCO OpenServer in the first half of 2004. I will keep you updated in the upcoming newsletters of the developments of Progress being support again on SCO OpenServer. Progress V9.1D Current commercial release: - UnixWare 7.1.1 - OpenServer 5.0.6 - OpenUnix 8.0.0 Progress V9.1D certification roadmap Q4 2003: - UnixWare 7.1.3 - OpenServer 5.0.7 Progress V10: - UnixWare 7.1.3 Q1 2004 Tech Tip Using your internal UNIX system for HTML information and default/home web pages. A lot of customers have UNIX and Linux systems in their office which are already activated to serve the local LAN, and even the Internet, as Web servers. An easy way to see if your server has Apache or Fasttrack enabled is to browse it, normally using its internal IP address, for example: http://192.168.1.1 This should show you the default "index.html" file in the server's "htdocs/html" directory. To add pages to test and use internal web servers further, you simply copy the html files into the "htdocs/html" directory and browse them. For example, say you created a HTML document and called it "contacts.html"; once copied to the HTML (htdocs/html) directory on the server you would access it with: http://192.168.1.1/contacts.html We use internal pages here on our servers for a variety of tasks but one main thing is to offer all users on the LAN a default "index.html" home page that they go to to get internal information and Hyper Links to Internet resources such as Google, Telstra White Pages, BOM and so on. Some common directories where the default htdocs (or html) directories can be found are: /usr/local/lib/apache/htdocs /var/www/html /usr/internet/ns_httpd/httpd-80/htdocs /home/www Don't let you UNIX/Linux system just sit there, make it a HTML resource. Back to Newsletters 
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