Customer Reviews

Scalix: Linux Administrator's Guide: Install, configure, and administer your Scalix Collaboration Platform email and groupware server

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Some of us remember using HP Open Mail in the early 90s. Very stable, and with the ability to scale up to many users. The book describes its strange journey, and how it morphed into something called Scalix. Perhaps you might agree with Feilner's characterisation of HP's marketing of Open Mail as being defined by a too-close relationship with Microsoft, and a reluctance by HP to position Open Mail as a direct competitor to Exchange. His account of Open Mail's travails is backed up by excerpts from contemporaneous accounts in the technical press.

Anyway, here we are today with Scalix. How does it look? The book describes a sophisticated GUI that lets the sysadmin easily handling managing a large email server. One immediate advantage is that the GUI lets you avoid direct editing of what Feilner calls the "horrible" sendmail syntax of the sendmail configuration files. Good. I was once a sysadmin of unix boxes, and sendmail had the well deserved reputation of being the most complicated package to manage. Its syntax is indeed dreadful, and if you know nothing of this because you use Scalix, you are fortunate.

Another very useful advantage of Scalix over a default sendmail is a more efficient holding of messages. Sendmail sends copies of a message to each recipient's mail file. As far as I know, there is no way with sendmail to avoid this. But Scalix uses a totally different storage approach, that avoids this replication. It lets Scalix scale up to handle more users and messages than sendmail.

I bought this book for the sake of integrating Scalix with OpenLDAP. Unfortunately, the integration chapter included talks very briefly about this and doesn't even have an example of how to use the most important tool omldapsync with OpenLDAP. I will get back to the Scalix wiki.

It's a good starting point, provides some examples, but in the end left me wanting for much more. Much of the focus is on installation - but that's one of the easiest things. I really would prefer more emphasis on the details of creating and using shared resources, delegating authority, etc.

I think Scalix has great potential that might be realized with excellent administrators and end user's documentation. This impressive product does a great deal very well indeed.

I have this book, and it is a great one. Previously, I spent an awful lot of time, pouring over different texts and progress was sluggish at best. This book gave me a lot of hints and pointed me straight away in the right direction, including backup scripts, updates etc etc. All in all, definitely worth having!