How big is a linux mail server in the IT industry?

mrblackmamba343

I want to know if Linux mail servers are really used in the production environment and whether you would recommend it against exchange. From what I understand sendmail is free. Exchange server will cost you thousands

pipemajor

I've been in several Fortune 100 environments over the past few years. Enterprise mail server of choice seems to be Lotus Notes.

srcurrie

In K-12's (Education) we use Linux servers which run Novell Groupwise. The servers are Suse Linux Open Enterprise Servers. There are clients for every platform.

Sendmail is okay but there are some issues with it and we need calendaring and the other feature provided by Groupwise. Postfix is better than Sendmail.

Linux rocks. Check out Novell.

Hyper-Me

sendmail is the biggest piece of tripe ever invented. It blows.

blargoe

You get what you pay for.

blargoe

Clarifying

Free Linux and free software like sendmail has its place, but in a busy production environment that has to be up, if you don't have someone that really knows what they hell they are doing... preferably the guy that set up the system in the first place, cost of ownership and lack of vendor support is a problem.

undomiel

Really comparing sendmail and Exchange aren't particularly fair at all since sendmail is just an MTA. Better comparisons would be to Zimbra or Unison which feature calendar, global contacts and so forth.

UnixGuy

Ideally you see Java Enterprise messaging suite in ISP(s) and telcos....I've seen it a lot.

Forsaken_GA

It depends on the context.

For internal mail, you'll usually see some form of groupware server, ala Exchange.

If you're running mail hosting services for customers, chances are you're running a unix based MTA. sendmail itself isn't actually used that much anymore, it's usually postfix, exim, qmail, and the like. They all provide sendmail compatible executables through for backwards compatibility purposes. It is much easier to configure something like postfix than it is to configure an honest to god sendmail setup

ally_uk

Of of our servers are Linux based we have about 30 users in this building the main server is a old compaq proliant Pentium 2, it's acting as a File / Mail / DNS / DHCP server and has been running about 2 years. In the last two years we haven't really had much of a problem with the Operating System, One of the power supplies failed in the server.

We deployed Open Source Solutions to keep the Cost down I have worked in a enviornment that was purely Microsoft before and the amount of updates, Service packs and Hot fixes was a bit of a nightmare to deal with.

If you are comfortable with working with Linux then you can deploy a Server in half the time it takes for a Microsoft Server Increased stability and with programs such as Webmin and Ebox you do not need to be a Linux Guru to get a server off the ground. It would be interesting to compare the uptime of a microsoft server and Linux server using the same hardware over the course of a year to see what problems they both encounter.

With Active directory Intergration available I just can't see why I have to use a Micorosft product

Pash

ally_uk wrote: »

With Active directory Intergration available I just can't see why I have to use a Micorosft product

Thats a bold statement, considering AD is infact a Microsoft technology.

Hyper-Me

ally_uk wrote: »

Of of our servers are Linux based we have about 30 users in this building the main server is a old compaq proliant Pentium 2, it's acting as a File / Mail / DNS / DHCP server and has been running about 2 years. In the last two years we haven't really had much of a problem with the Operating System, One of the power supplies failed in the server.

We deployed Open Source Solutions to keep the Cost down I have worked in a enviornment that was purely Microsoft before and the amount of updates, Service packs and Hot fixes was a bit of a nightmare to deal with.

If you are comfortable with working with Linux then you can deploy a Server in half the time it takes for a Microsoft Server Increased stability and with programs such as Webmin and Ebox you do not need to be a Linux Guru to get a server off the ground. It would be interesting to compare the uptime of a microsoft server and Linux server using the same hardware over the course of a year to see what problems they both encounter.

With Active directory Intergration available I just can't see why I have to use a Micorosft product

You're post is so full of half-truths and lies and astonishinly funny irony its not even..well..funny.

Why are you studying for MCDST is you prefer to work in "open source" environments on POS servers?

If the uptime of a nix server beats out the windows server its likely because a lot of nix admins think they can "Set it and forget it" and dont realize that EVERY OS needs to be patched and maintained. A good admin makes sure his system is patched, maintained and ready for whatever may come...not turning it on and hoping it lasts 10 years without seeing it again.

And no, you cant deploy a nix server in half the time, thats just absurd.

Lastly, as Pash pointed out, AD is a microsoft product.

dynamik

I could probably configure a pretty sizable Exchange organization before I could figure out how to get sendmail to work. I think it comes down to personal experience; I doubt there would be that large of a gap if you were equally skilled with both MS and *nix. There's pros and cons to each, and there's no need to get all worked up. At least we can all agree that Macs suck, right?

(And yes, before someone blows a gasket, I'm well aware that Macs are *nix-based)

mrblackmamba343

I bought a linux cbt on sendmail and postfix. I was able to setup my Linux email server in less 24 hrs. Best thing is, it is free!!! Plus I was able to setup webmail with sendmail using squirrel mail

UnixGuy

postfix, squirrel mail, ..and many other products are much simpler than sendmail, and easier to setup

Forsaken_GA

Hyper-Me wrote: »

If the uptime of a nix server beats out the windows server its likely because a lot of nix admins think they can "Set it and forget it" and dont realize that EVERY OS needs to be patched and maintained. A good admin makes sure his system is patched, maintained and ready for whatever may come...not turning it on and hoping it lasts 10 years without seeing it again.

The nice thing about unix servers is they rarely *need* to be rebooted. Kernel changes are about the only reason. Upgrading packages? cool, no need to reboot. Oh, there's a major security flaw in libssl because some Debian developer commented out something he shouldn't have? No problem, just upgrade the library and restart a few services. What you say certainly can be true, but it's not absolute. It's a trivial task to set your monitoring to alert you to when upgrades are available to your packages, and they very rarely require a reboot (hell they usually don't even interrupt the service for end users). That's why Unix boxes have alot of uptime.

And no, you cant deploy a nix server in half the time, thats just absurd.

Your right, it's absurd. I can deploy a nix server in the quarter of the time it takes me to deploy a windows server. Your post betrays that you have very very little experience working with unix systems in a production environment.

We pxe boot new servers into a linux environment, partition the drives, format them, download tarballs of our base OS install, unarchive on the new partitions, and then run the bootloader to write the boot sector. Then we run a script to change the hostname and the IP's of the server. Reboot, and new server comes up ready for service. Takes about 15 minutes.

Compare that to the amount of time it takes me to install a windows server and then patch it, because god knows I'm sure as hell NOT putting a microsoft machine onto a publicly accessible network before every single possible update is installed.

undomiel

Personally I just prefer click, deploy VM. Tada! Linux and Windows machines deployed at the same rate!

Hyper-Me

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

Compare that to the amount of time it takes me to install a windows server and then patch it, because god knows I'm sure as hell NOT putting a microsoft machine onto a publicly accessible network before every single possible update is installed.

The same, or less. Considering i can pxe boot with WDS, fully unattend the WDS process AND the OS install, and also set post config scripts to set the machine up with pretty much any role it needs on its own.

You obviously show you inexperience working in a Windows environment, as much as I shown mine working in a nix environment.

Solaris_UNIX

blargoe wrote: »

Clarifying

Free Linux and free software like sendmail has its place, but in a busy production environment that has to be up, if you don't have someone that really knows what they hell they are doing... preferably the guy that set up the system in the first place, cost of ownership and lack of vendor support is a problem.

OK, to clarify a few things:

(1) You said: "Sendmail has it's place." I strongly disagree with this statement. Sendmail is basically obsolete software that was first shipped in 1979. What we should be doing is comparing Microsoft products to something in Linux / UNIX that is more modern and cutting edge like Postfix with Dovecot or Postfix with Courier. You wouldn't think it's fair to compare MS-DOS 4.0 to Windows Server 2003, so why are we comparing Sendmail to Microsoft Exchange? The greatest tragedy of our times (IMO) is that some major vendors (Red Hat and Sun Microsystems and HP-UX, I'm looking at you) are still including Sendmail as the default pre-installed MTA (for maintaining backwards compatibility, I assume) when they should be shipping with Postfix. NetBSD and Ubuntu Server ship with Postfix as the default pre-installed MTA, so RHEL and OpenSolaris should "get with the times" IMO and do this as well.

(2) There are some newer Linux based solutions that are SO easy and SO full proof to deploy that they are getting to the point where it is almost "turn key" in terms of how easy it is to deploy (i.e. it's so easy your 80 year old grandma could do it if she knows SSH and knows the right handful of commands to type in).... a good example of this is Ubuntu Server, which, because it's Debian based, has an easy text-based menu / wizard system that you can ssh into the box and run with the "dpkg-reconfigure" command to use to configure things so you don't have to edit flat text files with vi or the dreaded Emacs. The dpkg-reconfigure menus in Ubuntu and Debian are just like the "Wizards" that you go through when you install a new program on Microsoft Windows (i.e. do you want option A, B, or C... click [Next]... do you want option D, E or F.... click [NEXT], etc. except that the dpkg-reconfigure menus are text-based (ncurses) because there's no graphics in SSH.

(3) Yes, someone who has a lot of experience with setting up Postfix in an easy operating system like Ubuntu server can probably deploy it much faster than you could do a Microsoft Exchange set up. For a basic Ubuntu Postfix configuration, you have to type in two commands at the root (#) prompt:

# aptitude install postfix

# dpkg-reconfigure postfix

and go through the dpkg wizard in less than 4 seconds and then you're done. The Posftix MTA is now sending and receiving e-mails and you can read your mail from the command line using the "mail" command and send mails going out using netcat or by using telnet to log in to port 25 locally and type in a message. The whole process takes me maybe less than 12 seconds to do a very basic setup like that provided the pre-requisites like the FQDN and the MX record are already there.

Obviously, in most real production environments you'll want to configure something like SASL authentication or maybe use a more intricate setup like a Maildir structure. And there's details on how to do it below if anyone here wants to try it out for themselves (keep in mind DNS and FQDN has to be set up for mail to actually work):

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Postfix

To install dovecot with postfix I just would have typed in:

# aptitude install postfix dovecot-imapd

in step one, but it's really not that much more complicated if you do this for a living and know what you're doing and stick with the default settings and don't use something more complicated like a Maildir structure.

Solaris_UNIX

Of course in a real production environment, this can all be automated with scripts, so there doesn't even need to be any
human interaction involved. With scripting and automation, one sysadmin can deploy 100,000 mail servers at the same time in less than two hours for maximum scalability (no virtualization or sleight of hand used here, just the same scripting and automated install techniques that have been around for 30+ years now).

Can somebody please tell me how I could use scripting and automation to do a hands off installation to deploy 100,000 Win2k3 servers with Exchange already configured properly and running on them in less than two hours?

I'd really like to know. With all the MCSE's that we have on this forum, somebody should know how to do it or at least be able to provide me with a URL link to a How To for creating something with tens of thousands of servers involved that can scale to handle the same traffic that Google's Gmail or Yahoo mail handles but using only Microsoft products.

Solaris_UNIX

mrblackmamba343 wrote: »

I want to know if Linux mail servers are really used in the production environment and whether you would recommend it against exchange. From what I understand sendmail is free. Exchange server will cost you thousands

Mrblackmamba, you're forgetting about UNIX as well as Linux. In answer to the real question: How big are Linux and UNIX servers in the IT industry?

Well, how big is Google and gmail? How big is Amazon.com? How big is Yahoo? How big is e-bay? How big is Linked In? How big is facebook?

Most major top tier Universities I've been to use UNIX mail servers although the Fortune 100's prefer IBM's Lotus Notes, and there's nothing wrong with that as Lotus Notes is a great product.

Also, keep in mind that the internet IS Unix. All those fancy CISCO ASA's that you're deploying to protect your Microsoft networks are nothing more than little green computer boxes with a Linux kernel installed on them with a "fake" CISCO command line interface running on top of the Linux kernel. Juniper routers are computers with FreeBSD installed on them. Force10 switches are computers with NetBSD installed on them.

At least 80% of all the networking appliances, routers, switches, firewalls out there in the world right now have some kind of BSD or Linux based kernel hidden under the UI running everything behind the scenes, so if you're interested at all in the Internet or in networking, you should learn Unix, plain and simple.

dynamik

How well does Gmail do unified messaging? No offense, but threads/arguments like this are stupid. Each technology has pros and cons and what works well in one scenario may be an absolute disaster in another.

And yes, it's an absolute breeze to script Exchange deployments. In fact, Microsoft is emphasizing this so much that the GUI shows you the corresponding Powershell command(s) for any action you take, so even total noobs can automate future deployments simply by copying and pasting.

Forsaken_GA

Hyper-Me wrote: »

The same, or less. Considering i can pxe boot with WDS, fully unattend the WDS process AND the OS install, and also set post config scripts to set the machine up with pretty much any role it needs on its own.

You obviously show you inexperience working in a Windows environment, as much as I shown mine working in a nix environment.

Properly implementing cloning technology is something that any admin worth their salt will learn. I'm well aware that Windows installs can be scripted in unattended.

With that being said, you'll forgive me if I doubt you can get it faster than 15 minutes The fact that a windows install, even scripted, is several times the size of the average linux server install does work against it. Our base install with a full LAMP stack is under 500 megs. I'll admit that I haven't installed Windows server recently, but I'm pretty sure that even barebones installs are measure in gigs. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

dynamik

I can do our refurb client machines in 7 minutes with ancient hardware and 100mb Ethernet

Forsaken_GA

dynamik wrote: »

I can do our refurb client machines in 7 minutes with ancient hardware and 100mb Ethernet

I said servers, not clients

dynamik

Pfft, details...

NightShade03

I'd say you are right with the 15 min mark. I've been working on automated installs for Windows servers lately and a barebones windows 2008 core is about that. Although this takes longer if you add more things to it (obv).

It's also worth nothing that speed isn't everything. If it takes my linux server 5 minutes to image and be configured via script, and my windows 2008 fully loaded server 3 hours...there isn't much difference in the long run. They will both be automated and fully setup and if you are running the build right before you leave work, you come in in the morning and everything will be done.

Hyper-Me

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

Properly implementing cloning technology is something that any admin worth their salt will learn. I'm well aware that Windows installs can be scripted in unattended.

With that being said, you'll forgive me if I doubt you can get it faster than 15 minutes The fact that a windows install, even scripted, is several times the size of the average linux server install does work against it. Our base install with a full LAMP stack is under 500 megs. I'll admit that I haven't installed Windows server recently, but I'm pretty sure that even barebones installs are measure in gigs. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

I havnt checked any of my Server 08 core installs lately....i do know that Hyper-V server comes in at around 600mb.

Even if core is a few gigs, it doesnt take that long with todays networking equipment.

I multicasted 60 workstations the other day in ~12 minutes, and that was a 8GB Vista image.

blargoe

I'm getting <20 minutes for a full blown 2008 install with all patches and our typical server utilities included using WDS.

Original point I think, is "Why use MS when Linux is free" doesn't really fly in an enterprise environment. Certainly, depending on the situation, good arguments could be made for one platform or the other. I sure as heck wouldn't run the Internet on IIS and Windows DNS, but I wouldn't run a medium sized company requiring enterprise level collaboration tools on anything but Microsoft's Exchange and Office Servers these days.

Hyper-Me

blargoe wrote: »

I'm getting <20 minutes for a full blown 2008 install with all patches and our typical server utilities included using WDS.

Original point I think, is "Why use MS when Linux is free" doesn't really fly in an enterprise environment. Certainly, depending on the situation, good arguments could be made for one platform or the other. I sure as heck wouldn't run the Internet on IIS and Windows DNS, but I wouldn't run a medium sized company requiring enterprise level collaboration tools on anything but Microsoft's Exchange and Office Servers these days.

It also doesnt fly because almost all of the actual enterprise ready linux stuff costs money as well. Either you are paying for support or you are paying actual license fees and either way they likely add up to as much or more than comparable MS products.

At least in the majority of the products we have compared and purchased.

Forsaken_GA

blargoe wrote: »

Original point I think, is "Why use MS when Linux is free" doesn't really fly in an enterprise environment. Certainly, depending on the situation, good arguments could be made for one platform or the other. I sure as heck wouldn't run the Internet on IIS and Windows DNS, but I wouldn't run a medium sized company requiring enterprise level collaboration tools on anything but Microsoft's Exchange and Office Servers these days.

I think you'd be surprised at how many enterprises are using Linux, BSD, or Solaris.

I will admit that in the collaboration department, open source software loses the duel. There are good enterprise collaboration tools that run on some form of Unix, but they all cost money as well. So sure, I'd agree that I wouldn't run collaboration on linux.

But I also wouldn't even dream of running core services on a Windows platform. Properly deployed, CentOS and Debian make very, very reliable platforms. We host some very large and well known names in the e-commerce world, and by and large, it's all done on Linux. For the folks who do have Windows servers, it's usually for one reason, and one reason only - Flash Media Server. (Adobe will only support Red Hat Enterprise, but it's much easier overall to use FMS on a Windows platform.) And we've recently gotten folks away from doing that by using lighttpd or apache's flash streaming modules, which have been more reliable than FMS, and end up saving the customer money to boot.

Now, I know it seems like I come across pretty anti-Microsoft. The truth of the matter is that I'm pretty OS agnostic. I believe in choosing the best tool for the job, and there are things that Windows is better at. ColdFusion immediately comes to mind. I absolutely *hate* supporting it on a Linux platform.

But when it comes down to it, insisting on using one type of platform is alot like using a flathead screwdriver when it's a phillips head screw. Sure, it might be possible, and with enough practice, you can get pretty good at it, but it's still less efficient and presents the opportunity for more pain.