open source

From the zarafa website:

"Zarafa is a software package that allows you to share e-mail and calendars via Outlook, on your PDA or through our Webaccess. The Zarafa Webaccess features the familiar Outlook ‘Look & Feel’ interface, and you can keep using the features in Outlook that have always allowed you to work efficiently; Opening your colleague’s calendar or sending a meeting request is a piece of cake…"

Today I attended a 1-day Zarafa course/exam. I had not been able to play a around with zarafa before so the first few slides of course and the first hands-on experience were very welcome.

I have to say I was impressed with the product as its outlook integration seems very easy: just install an additional outlook plugin from an MSI installer(easily deployable with login scripts, …), input the appropriate ip address or host and off you are. The client working with outlook won’t even notice the difference!

Offcourse the financial department will notice the difference, as will the IT department. Zarafa is a good M$ Exchange alternative and… cheaper…! Zarafa is built on the linux platform and on the open-source MTA so some modifications are rather easy.

To get an impression of zarafa (click image for large version):

Or go to http://demo.zarafa.com

Yes indeed, zarafa web access looks ~ the same as the outlook web access so your users (used to outlook) won’t have to ‘adapt’.

The course itself was okey, the only thing they could implement in their next course is a Zarafa installation from scratch as we worked with a downloadable vmware image.

To end this rather informative and not so technical post: I do got my Zarafa Certificate! :-)

Today I read about a tool that’s called OTS (Open Text Summarizer) on the debain package of the day website. It summarizes a text using word frequency to prepare a list of keywords and assign priority to sentences based on that frequency. Time to test it?

So, I tested it just for fun to see how well it summarizes. The first summary I had it do was one of the ISPConfig entry I wrote yesterday.

The output:

As we got our new serenity server we decided to use ISPConfig to enable us to easely create hosting plans/clients/sites so that we can offer these services in the not so far feature. Now ok, you can change the user prefix to [DOMAIN]_ by logging in as admin and changing it in the ISPConfig settings. If you would want a copy of the script, you can obtain it here: http://dev.paradize.be/ispconfig/ It.s written in Perl because I.m used to Perl :)

Not that great, this one but hey it’s an automated tool, can’t expect a little tool to be as smart as humans can we? No “I, ROBOT” situations for us in the future.

As we got our new serenity server we decided to use ISPConfig to enable us to easely create hosting plans/clients/sites so that we can offer these services in the not so far future.

ISPConfig is actually very easy to use, and works fine but I do have some remarks:

The first thing that bothers me is that when you create users/databases/… the prefix for these things is web[nr]_ . Now ok, you can change the user prefix to [DOMAIN]_ by logging in as admin and changing it in the ISPConfig settings. If you do this you get a nicer structure, usernames being formed like: domain.tld_username, BUT the directories on the server remain /var/www/web[nr] as do the database name, database user…

The second thing that bothers me is that ISPConfig lacks an important feature in my opinion. When you start hosting websites for some clients, and they got an emailadress, they don’t want to login with web[nr]_username, not even with domain.tld_username!! You want to be able to let them login with just ‘username’ or username@domain.tld. This last option is the most interesting and I found a howto (http://www.howtoforge.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7881) explaining how to accomplish this, but either it’s to old, or it just ’sucks’.

The main settings are ok, but the script …

They say in the howto that it’s a formatting problem on the forum, and ok that’s ONE of the problems, another problem is that the script just doesn’t work. First of all, it ‘greps’ on the wrong value (being user) while in my case I had to grep on ‘web’ and secondly, the structure is all wrong, it cuts on the | delimiter but one of my user had a ‘|’ in the password hash, so it totally fucked up.

After a bit of testing I just wrote my own version of the script and now, … IT WORKS!

P.S. If you would want a copy of the script, you can obtain it here: http://www.bdeferme.net/blog/stuff/isp_mail_script.txt
It’s written in Perl because I’m used to Perl :)