The Server build is now complete, and the mail moved over. There’s a few good reasons why the open-source tools and software I’ve used rock.
Ubuntu Linux, Postfix, Spamassassin, Dovecot and Samba provide a full server solution that provides much of the features of Microsoft Small Business Server, but for no cost. They also run acceptably on cast-off hardware- the laptop I’m using is a Celeron M 1400 with 512M of RAM and a IDE hard drive. There’s also free software that can add the rest of the features claimed for SBS, but I have no need for them. If you also consider that SBS is based on Bloody Exchange, then just don’t go there.
That lot I knew anyway. The big surprise was to come: I’d planned to use Ghost or PQDI to transfer the build to a bigger hard disk (having built it on the 40GB one the old laptop came with), so I was dissapointed to find that PQDI didn’t handle the partitions, a newish version of Ghost kept hanging, and an older Ghost gave a multitude of errors.
Free softwareto the rescue!. Clonezilla did an amazingly fast job of imaging the hard drive, and Gparted resized the partitions easily. Both are available as a bootable CD image, and Clonezilla detects network cards out of the box. In other words, they cost less and work better than the commercial product….
…Which brings me to Firefox 3. Faster and better than IE7. If you’re not using it, then you should.
I am a great fan of open source stuff, as it often allow me to get under the bonnet and understand how it works,
unfortunatly a certain large ex civil service org I know, insists on EVERYTHING having formal support wrap, and week worths of paperwork before ANY software enters the organisation, so the cost of the software is small fry
a recent experiance with squid, allowed me to “fix” a problem in less than a day, but 4 weeks to get the formal approval to use and install it
But then this is also an organisation, which pays “consultants” huge sums of money to tell them something they were told in house 3 months ago…..
Most organisations don’t/won’t use OSS as they feel that since they son’t pay for it, it has no value: plus, there’s no-one to shout at. OSS only gets in by the backdoor when a techie uses it to solve a problem.
The fact is of course, you can pay for support, and with commercial software, when you do shout, the vendor doesn’t give a shit anyway 🙂