Back to Newsletters KEYWORDS=webdav, caldav, calendar, e-mail, client, cosmo, thunderbird, sunbird, lightning, mozilla, google, date, Davrom Consulting Newsletter - Issue # 37 - Dated: 16 May 2007 From the desk of David Clark You have got to love the recent spate of Mac adds on TV regarding Vista. You can also see them on youtube.com. We have been working with some recent projects to get customers up and running with Thunderbird e-mail, Sunbird/Lightning calendar sharing on Windows interfacing with Linux servers - and it is great to see the continuance of inexpensive solutions from the open source community. We have been doing some background work on our website and if you are responsible for your web presence then looking into Google's Webmaster Tools is well worth the time. What don't Google do? I would like to thank the reader for their time in reading this newsletter. David.M.Clark UNIX Quote If you want to travel around the world and be invited to speak at a lot of different places, just write a Unix operating system. (By Linus Torvalds) Thunderbird If you are looking for a good e-mail client that runs on either Linux, Mac or Windows, I can thoroughly recommend Thunderbird from Mozilla. Thunderbird is part of the free product offerings from Mozilla who also provide the Firefox web browser which also runs on Linux, Mac and Windows. Thunderbird comes feature rich with all of the nice features that can be found in any e-mail client these days: Personal Folders, Message Filtering, Junk Mail sorting, Message tagging and all the things that make e-mail the essential communication/todo list tool that it is today. Coming from Netscape Messenger to Thunderbird was just a natural progression and it allows me to continue to keep my e-mails stored as ASCII text - ASCII text can be read by anything and preserves my accessibility to the e-mail content well into the future. Thunderbird is simple to install and comes with a whole host of add-ons - read the next article for a brief description of Lightning/Sunbird. I would encourage you to download and try it - you won't go back to Outlook if you do. And when you want to upgrade to the next release of Thunderbird you wont have the huge task as you do with Outlook for keeping messages and contacts - Thunderbird just keeps on using the same folder/file format and folder location. http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird Sunbird and Lightning I have recently been requested by customers to install calendar sharing capability between Windows users using a Linux server as the host. This is where implementing the WebDAV/CalDAV or Cosmo solutions on Linux and combining them with Mozilla's Sunbird or Lightning products, giving Windows users calendar sharing without the need for MS Exchange. And what's more, it is all free software. (Linux e-mail systems such as Scalix and Kolab provide calendaring with e-mail as well.) If you are running a Linux server it is very easy to setup the WebDAV facility, especially on Fedora (RedHat), and create simple calendar access using the WebDAV features in conjunction with Mozilla Sunbird/Lightning. Users simply authenticate their access to a specific calendar file (staff, sales, meetings) to view and update the calendar for all users to see. The Mozilla Sunbird product, again a free product, allows you to interface directly into the calendar system and the Mozilla Lightning product, also free, is an add-on product to Thunderbird which is essentially calendaring within the e-mail system. Very nice products that now allow end-users to share calendars without having the high cost of paying for the same features found in other e-mail/calendaring systems. For more information on Sunbird and Lightning please visit: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/lightning From the Trenches Some comic or not so comic relief from the support days gone by. A frozen disk or a frozen chook: I recall some years ago a customer had reported that they were able to get a clients information off an overheating hard disk which had died by putting the hard drive into the freezer overnight. Apparently they were able to get the drive to stay up long enough to get the information off it. With great scepticism I looked on as my colleagues bundled the hard disk in freezer wrapping and placed in the office freezer. At this point in time I had joked that they were more likely to get inforamtion off a frozen chicken than a frozen hard disk. The next morning my colleagues found that they could not get anything off the frozen disk - and didn't want to try my suggestion of trying a frozen chicken as well. 20 milli-second cluck time at 4800 bawks per minute. Tech Tip Filenames using the date/time stamp: When programming in the UNIX/Linux shell environment you often need to create unique files for storing information such as backup logs or something along the lines of an information/log file that you may need to reference in the future. This is where I have found using the date command an execellent tool for giving files a unique name. Consider the following example: STAMP=`date +%y%m%d` MYLOGFILE=/tmp/backup_${STAMP} tar -cvf /dev/st0 /bin >${MYLOGFILE} The example above will create a variable called STAMP with the credentials of yymmdd which for the date of this newsletter would equate to 070515. The variable of MYLOGFILE becomes /tmp/backup_070515 and the output of the tar command is placed in the file /tmp/backup_070515. If this program were set to run each day I would have a log file for each day the backup is performed. I could then check what was backed up on a specific day simply by using the file's name rather than having to list the specific file and use the date/time creation information such as that seen with the "ls -l" command. As this very year, month, day, minute and second will never occur again I tend to take this approach when wanting to create a unique file name that gives the most specific date information about the file - the date command I use is: STAMP=`date +%y%m%d%H%M%S` which creates a variable of yymmddhhmmss - and based on the example above produces 070515155100. The date command is loaded with options and you can find out more about what they are by going to your UNIX/Linux command line and typing: man date Back to Newsletters 
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