We run our mail services in house. At the moment I'm kinda stuck
between a rock and a hard place, on one side the majority of our e-mail
and mailing lists operate on some bastardised qmail/ezmlm set-up (it's
running with patches I've not found anywhere else, and I'm fairly
familiar with the usual setup), and on the other hand we've got a Zimbra
server that provides some groupware stuff for staff, but was primarily
set up to allow us to host e-mail for a customer as a sweetener after
their previous vendor seriously messed them up.
The qmail just works, except when it doesn't and then its an arse to
troubleshoot and fix. Zimbra just works, but annoyingly frequently it
randomly breaks. Earlier this week it decided it didn't trust itself as
an MTA about half the time people tried to send e-mail through it.
The fundamentally broken upgrade procedures that I went through a couple
of weekends ago (likewise 6->7) I swear have added a few grey hairs to
my head. What should have been a simple upgrade resulted in 10 hours
straight work (aborted and reverted at 3am), 3 days the next week trying
to figure out what went wrong using a VM, and then a further day at the
weekend to actually get the upgrade done. The bugs I hit up against
were nothing new either, there are threads on their forums that Zimbra
technical folk appear on that are about the same problems I hit. The
bugs we hit post 7 drive me slowly crazy, though it's slowly getting
better and there are a bunch of improvements that are really quite
significant (filtering is hugely improved, for example)
Next year it's on my schedule to migrate all of our mail over to
Zimbra.. you can guess how much I'm looking forward to that prospect!
Paul
On 12/16/2011 10:28 AM, Lawrence K. Chen, P.Eng. wrote:
I spend most of my time dealing with e-mail issues.
But, we outsourced our e-mail system about 3 years ago.
Yes, I spend more time doing e-mail system stuff than I did before we
outsourced it.
We've also spent millions of dollars on the outsourcing of e-mail.
The year before the decision to outsource it, the director level types
were bragging that they only put $30,000 into e-mail. Don't know how
much we had asked to upgrade e-mail a couple years earlier, but pretty
sure we didn't know millions could be asked for. I think we did pry a
little more than $30,000 out of them while we were keeping it running
to the migration. Though we weren't supposed to make any significant
changes or improvements to it (though at one point, they wanted us to
take functionality out of it....because the provider wasn't intending
to provide those features.)
Meanwhile, one of the leaders of the campus system administrator group
took a poke at central IT last week....about whether they're just
paying us central sysadmins to keep the lights on, because the IT
leadership keeps outsourcing everything. The CIO is on a mission to
consolidate IT (there's talk at the state level that all the
universities should consolidate their IT, not just within a
university.) Though my manager has said repeatedly that you can't
just take a department sysadmin and drop them into our group and make
them central. After all, some of them used to work for central IT
before they had to go into positions elsewhere on campus.
On the upside....because we've outsourced e-mail. When it goes down,
we can still do things like eat lunch. And, I don't have to deal with
compromised accounts from hotel wifi when I'm at a conference, in
training or on vacation.
Our contract for outsourcing comes up for renewal in about 9 months.
And, the CIO is talking about moving our mail somewhere else...except
that estimates are that it'll take a year to make that kind of
decision. The former associate VPIT used to say the threat of moving
mail elsewhere was an attempt to get the provider to come down on
price (and not just continue to not pay for other features we've been
using, etc.) Except that now word is out, and people want us to
switch now....though they don't really know what they want.... Just
that it has to be faster, better, more features and be just like it
was before we outsourced. (they want everything and nothing?)
I think I used to do other stuff too.... and maybe I'll get to do some
of that again before the end of the year. But, our service provider
upgraded from Zimbra 6.0.10 to Zimbra 7.1.3 during Thanksgiving....and
all sorts of new and old issues have come piling in.
Meanwhile..there are some people that have come out and said that
e-mail should've been considered part of our core business. Though I
don't know if I'd want to have e-mail come back to us. Though
officially, our e-mail administrator position has been vacant before I
started here...since Google lured him away. Wonder if we would get
real people to take care of e-mail if it did come back. Though not
sure how much different we'd go... we'd probably run parts of Zimbra
if we had to take it back.... The mailstore/web/client access could
stay zimbra like. Its like how we wanted to redo e-mail if given the
chance. Though we'd keep our separate MX, MTA, AV, SPAM layers.
Though we first went with current provider, they had like 2 ldap
servers, 2 proxy servers, 4 MTAs and 4 mailstores.....but somewhere
the the 4 MTAs and 4 mailstores, became 7 mailstores/MTAs. Think
there are 3 ldap servers now (one dedicated for the ironport that's in
front of things now.) Nothing like answering, why was webmail not
available during the test of the RAVE system? (and why wasn't it a
problem before?)
Though there's that strange feeling when the service provider is
explaining that part of the performance problems we've been having is
because of hacks we had done in the old system to make it work the way
we wanted and that they had upgraded that system to the new version,
rather than doing a clean install. And, the CIO wanting to know why
we didn't do a clean install. Umm, it would wipe out all the existing
data?
Personally, I'd be fine...if I had to move all my mail out and then
back after an upgrade. But, I'm not going to do it for anybody else
(or worry about the share, invitee, etc. relationship stuff.) I'd
like to reorganize how some of my e-mail is organized, and I haven't
had time to clean up my inbox in a while.
--
Who: Lawrence K. Chen, P.Eng. - W0LKC - Senior Unix Systems Administrator
For: Enterprise Server Technologies (EST) -- & SafeZone Ally
Snail: Computing and Telecommunications Services (CTS)
Kansas State University, 109 East Stadium, Manhattan, KS 66506-3102
Phone: (785) 532-4916 - Fax: (785) 532-3515 - Email: [email protected]
Web: http://www-personal.ksu.edu/~lkchen - Where: 11 Hale Library
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