17 October 2011

Goodbye Exchange

I believe the root cause to have been a replication failure in Active Directory. If this was a work or client situation I would have paid Microsoft for a support incident, but answers not forthcoming, I had to ask myself if running exchange for 1 user was worth the resources it consumed. The answer was NO. In fact, I’ve decided that running active directory for 1 user wasn’t making sense. When my career was supporting Windows maintaining an enterprise (windows) environment at home made sense, now that I’ve professionally shifted to the Unix world, hanging on to a Microsoft-Centric home infrastructure only made sense if it was low maintenance.

Friday night with active directory fairly broken but Login, DNS and DHCP services functional it was time to find another solution.

I saved my postfix configuration and installed dovecot. I installed my certificate to sasl.

Then I installed squirrelmail, it worked right off the bat with my temporary configuration.

It took some playing around to merge the two configurations, which turned out to be a waste of time because the only thing that needed to change were the transport maps which had formerly specified my home exchange server (on port 58 because verizon blocks 25) to local:node.brainbuz.org.

With a couple of hours of playing my former relay host server had become a viable imap and webmail server.

There was one hiccough with Thunderbird being unable to move deleted items to “Trash”. Modifying the imap directive in dovecot.conf fixed it.

protocol imap {
        mail_plugins = autocreate
        }

I have more clients now: outlook running on windows and thunderbird on linux, and squirrel as a third client replacing owa. The client that gave me the most trouble was alpine which I eventually got working as an imap client, if I find myself using it I’ll figure out how to make it stop requiring my password. Ironically because I had to set up Alpine as an imap client, I now know how to set Alpine up as an Exchange Client! Both support IMAP.

The last thing was rules with 4+ clients, rules have to run server side not client side. Activating Sieve for Dovecot was pretty easy, and getting avelseive activated in squirrelmail was  trivial. So squirrelmail is the client that rules my rules (because it is the client I can get to from anywhere).

Done Mail Migrated from Exchange to Dovecot. And a couple of longterm Exchange issues, resolved (but not solved).

• Proxying Outlook Web Access behind Apache. no longer an issue. I no longer have to use port 8443 as my work around.
• Getting task scheduler to run the backup script written in powershell. No longer matters. I’m using maildir and it is just files. If I can’t backup up a bunch of files I’m in the wrong line of work, now the problem is how do I want to back them up!
• Needing another certificate for my home mail server. OK this wasn’t worth $13 a year to fix, squirrelmail is using the certificate I already bought for brainbuz.org.

Next up, the internal network and I think transfering DHCP and DNS to linux is first. I see an rsync based replication and backup strategy that will also lead to replacing my KineticD backup service.