zimbra

Open Source products that add to the bottom line

I have often wondered when the thought processes of people would shift from equating Linux and Open Source as one and the same. I need not wonder any longer as that time is here. And this is a good thing.

In the past people, more often than not, spoke of Linux and Open Source in a way that would lead one to believe that they are one and the same. Until a year or two ago this was probably true as most open source applications were only available on Linux. Now though, open source applications are standing on their own and are becoming known as Open Source applications not Linux applications.

Kudos to the developers for causing this shift. Why? The open source developers, unlike Windows developers, are creating cross platform applications that will either run on Windows or run Windows software. They are doing this at breakneck speed as well. It is easy to understand why when you look at the economic business models of open source.

The business models of open source generate revenue by selling update and support services as opposed to selling licenses. It is the nature of open source to not sell licenses as the source code is open. There would be no point in it.

Now take a look at the economy. It’s not rocket science to see that spending, even IT spending, is slowing down. Now, if I have a product that I will let you have for free and even give you the choice of whether or not to by updates and service with it, and it will run on Windows or Linux, what are you going to do? Go buy the Windows only application with all of it’s license fees plus the annual “maintenance” fee that is 20% of the original license fee? Only if you don’t have the sense God gave a baboon.

I’ll give you some examples of open source applications that fill the need for productive and secure applications that can be done at an open source cost.

Vyatta open source routers. From their website: “Vyatta solutions combine the features, performance, and reliability of an enterprise router and firewall with the cost savings, flexibility, and security of open source to introduce new levels of economics, choice, and control into the network.”. If you interpret “enterprise router and firewall” as Cisco or HP you are probably right on the money. No pun intended.

How about Jitterbit open source integration software? Jitterbit handles integration of data between heterogeneous applications so that the information is combined. With a customer list that includes NASA and Continental Airlines who would think that they shouldn’t use open source software?

There are many others out there including Alfresco that competes with Microsoft’s Sharepoint to the point of integrating with Microsoft Office and offering shared drives. Take the Zimbra Collaboration Suite that has seamless compatibility with clients like Microsoft Outlook, Apple desktop suite, and Mozilla Thunderbird, add in the connectors for Blackberry, Smartphone and Alfresco and you have a collaboration suite that rivals any on the market for functionality and beats them on cost whether or not you purchase their services.

So given today’s economy and the fact the company needs to generate a profit to keep from laying off people, I believe you should strongly consider what open source has to offer.

-j

Ubuntuserver is unbelievably stupid

Yes you read the title right. Ubunutserver is unbelievably stupid.

Ok let’s take it from the top. I had Ubuntuserver 7.0.4 installed as my WebDAV secure server, my son’s baseball team’s website, samba and so on. I run this server headless and without a gui. Note here that the normal install is without a gui and is touted loudly by the folks who develop ubuntuserver. This is all well and good.

Lately it’s been on my mind to look into and install a collaboration suite. Having searched around I finally landed on Zimbra.

After reading the documentation I see that Zimbra is certified on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. Ok, well this is as good of a time to upgrade as any. This is where the fun (read stupidity) begins.

I ssh into my server as normal. I do all of the pre-distribution upgrade stuff, reboot and begin the distribution upgrade. The first thing I get is a message saying something to the effect of “We do not recommend using SSH while you upgrade. If you lose a connection it is difficult to recover.” Ok. I’m not doing this over a WAN link but on my local LAN. I haven’t had any network outages since I don’t know when, the sun is shining so no power outages looming. Things are looking good.

The upgrade proceeds smoothly. On several occasions I am asked if I want to replace any of my configuration files. This include the sshd configuration file. On all of these I take the default which is “Do not replace, I want to keep the configuration file that I am currently using” . That’s paraphrased but that is what it meant.

The distribution upgrade finishes. I get a nice message saying everything went well and asking me if I want to reboot. Of course I do. I type y and off we go. After waiting the appropriate amount of time I try to SSH back in. I am pretty excited at this point about getting my Zimbra install started.

Uhoh. No such luck. The dreaded “ssh: connect to host 10.10.15.105 port 22: Connection refused” message. What?!? Are you kidding me? No way. I try pinging the server. Yep, network came back ok. I try again. Nope. And several times after that. Now I’m writing this rant.

You see, here is why I think this is stupid. The server installs without a gui. That implies that no one is going to use this for a workstation. If no one is going to use it for a workstation, why then, should it have a monitor on it? If it doesn’t have a monitor on it, why would you not want someone to upgrade using SSH? Would the Ubuntuserver people prefer telnet instead? If the upgrade process is smart enough to know that you are upgrading over SSH then why not start SSHD on the reboot? If that is in fact the problem since I haven’t dragged a monitor over there to see.

I made a decision not long ago not to scrap my Ubuntuserver in favor of CentOS. I am starting to regret that decision. You see there is at least one other annoyance with Ubuntusever that I don’t find appealing either. This is the fact that they have decided that using an inittab is old fashioned or something. While this doesn’t have much affect on a server, at least one not running a gui, have you tried to boot into runlevel 3 lately? It’s not nearly as easy as it is with a GRUB boot loader where you can edit it, type in 3, hit enter and b and boot to runlevel 3.

Ok, I’m done. Next free time that I have I’m putting CentOS on there (as soon as I drag a monitor to the server and get SSHD started that is).

-j