James Titcumb

Since we started using Eclipse PDT as our primary IDE at Netbasic, there is nothing stopping us from moving to use Linux (for me, specifically Ubuntu) as our operating systems.

Except for one thing… Outlook. It’s a huge drawback because, like most corporate offices, we use calendaring functions, tasks, global address books, and loads of other features on our Exchange server. I did a bit of Googling and found out that since 2007-odd, Evolution (the default mail client with Ubuntu) supports Exchange out of the box. Always wary of things like this, to check it worked, I loaded up a new Ubuntu VM and fired it up. There was a bit of confusion getting it to work, and it repeatedly asked for my password. Once it finally got it working, it slowly loaded. I tried going through a few folders, and it was repeatedly slow. I did another quick Google, and others shared the problem. I restarted Evolution and then it repeatedly asked me for password.

Essentially, it’s obviously a hack to get it working efficiently, which really isn’t what a corporate environment needs. The beauty of Outlook is that you stick in the name of the user, and it loads up everything. In any corporate environment, this is a huge stumbling block for people considering switching to Linux who use Exchange servers.

There are two solutions I see to this - fiddle with Evolution more until it works, or use VirtualBox to run a little VM of Windows with Outlook (see this guide). Personally, I wouldn’t mind running VirtualBox to do it at work, it would provide me with other advantages too…

Update 23rd Oct ‘08: Well it turns out I was wrong. I’m not sure if it was simply a problem of me running it in a VM and having network issues or something, but I just tried it here at home using exactly the same settings and it actually works like a dream!

Unfortunately, I asked our tech lead, Kelvin, and I’m not allowed to install Linux on my work PC (unless it’s in a VM) due to him “being able to access stuff”… although I don’t see why not as I can set up everything just the way other networked PCs are set up in Linux. I tried to set up Ubuntu in a VM image, and supposedly VMware supports multiple monitors, but I couldn’t get it to work, so until I can convince Kelvin otherwise, I’m stuck with Windows….

I followed some guide on the interwebs this evening to set up a password-less SSH connection to my server. I followed all the steps correctly, but kept getting “Server refused our key” in PuTTY.

Thankfully, after a quick Google, this guide helped me out and got it working.

The solution is that Windows sucks, and you should always generate your keys in Linux.

What?! It seems illogical to me that Microsoft, after years of development still require you to restart your computer after installing trivial pieces of software, yet in Linux, the only time you need to restart is if you want to try out a new kernel or something… strange indeed.

Pretty much everyone knows about Cygwin, and it’s certainly useful. But there’s another option for getting a UNIX shell on Windows, and it’s much more simple and lightweight. This option is UnxUtils, and it’s incredibly easy to get running. Download the ZIP file from the website, and unzip in an appropriate folder, e.g. C:\unxutils\.

Once unzipped, add the following to the PATH environment variable (Start > Control Panel > System > Advanced system settings > Advanced > Environment Variables)

;C:\unxutils\bin\;C:\unxutils\usr\local\wbin\

Expecting more? That’s it. Open a new shell (Start > Run > cmd.exe), you can use most common UNIX tools, such as grep, date, ls, gawk and loads more.

So I started thinking a bit more last night and I’ve started various musings now about the structure of my new home server. I’ve decided it’s going to be virtual IP-based at least (although not 100% decided!), and I know that I’ll want the DNS server to be updated etc. I’m going to write the control panel in a similar fashion to ISPConfig, the util that I currently use, but I’m going to personalise it especialy for my system. Once it’s set up and running, then I can erase the old server, and set it up as a slave server. Somewhere between doing all that, I’m going to get the RAID array working with the hotswap bay I have, which hasn’t been used in yonks. I’ll also split as equally as possible the hard drives between the two, and setup some kind of rsync for the data, and also some kind of MySQL cloning. There’s a lot of prep work and planning to do to make sure I do this right, so I’m going to start planning this weekend.

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