6 tips on keeping your e-mail server space usage under control.

I was inspired to write this post when listening to this week's Casting From the Server Room Podcast.

There are lots of hidden costs that make megabytes matter - RAID disk space, backup space, backup transfer time.... and not to mention (as every sysadmin knows) the fact that an e-mail server running low on disk space can be a sustainable source of stress. Here's a few preventative tips that might help you keep your head on straight.

1. Invest in a good anti-spam solution

The battle against bloat starts at the source. Every message that comes into your system has a chance of taking up space. Use a combination of anti-spam measures and hit it from all angles. An edge MTA and DNS black listing are very effective measures because messages are stopped even before they enter your mail store - and occupy inboxes and junk folders.

2. Teach your users the do's and don'ts of e-mail

Education is always a good defense- remember, even if your efforts fall on deaf ears, there are always some users that want to do the Right Thing(tm), and are just waiting for you to tell them what that is. Make a simple list of do's and don'ts and distribute it to your users once a year.

3. Give users adequate network space

Network drive space is cheaper for you to manage than e-mail server space. Don't give users an excuse to keep those big attachments in their e-mail account. They should save them and delete the message.

4. Set conservative mailbox quotas, early

...Even if you have extra space. Users will be more likely to adopt good mail management habits if quotas are on. They need to see the size of their inbox grow against a limit, or it will be perceived as bottomless. If you're implementing a new quota policy, a good rule of thumb is to take the average mailbox size, double it, and use that for the quota.

5. Police inactive accounts

This may seem obvious, but don't leave dead accounts open for business. When students or employees leave, be sure to stick to a firm and consistent account removal policy. The fewer accounts you have, the less the chances of both spammers - and spam - finding your system.

6. Set your system to expire trashed items after a reasonable amount of time.

Some users just don't empty the trash. You don't need to be a star and set a super short expiry time, just assign some kind of a time period.

Choosing a Small Business Telephone System

Recently a friend of mine asked me to recommend a business telephone system for his (starting out) small business. He needs to be able to connect someone somewhere else as though they are in the same office. This is becoming more and more of a basic need for all businesses- the modern office is really made up of several people's home offices, scattered geographically and connected via broadband, with no real "center". Nonetheless, I took a moment to highlight my experiences regarding traditional PBX systems as well.

---snip----

We have a Samsung Officeserv iDCS 500. I personally don't find it to be easy to manage at all. I have received many requests that would be very straightforward to resolve on other systems, which have fallen dead due to lack of clear documentation and poorly implemented management software. At $6,000, I don't even think it was that cheap. To its credit, however, it does make the process of provisioning off-site VOIP extensions a fairly no-nonsense operation, as we have found.

If you are going to purchase a phone system for your office, and you
expect it to scale, I would stick with the tried and true "gold standards" of phone systems. Buy something made by Avaya (partner) or AT&T (merlin). There's tons of support, hardware vendor choices, and documentation available. Seek a second hand phone system on ebay or websites like usedphones.com that have put together nice packages. Make sure that you choose one that allows VOIP extensions and voicemail. Be prepared to spend around $2000 to start, and $100-$200 per phone. In my experience, this is a better alternative to buying a cheap phone system that has idiosyncrasies, and that you are stuck with for a long time.

If you are really strapped and aren't afraid to get your hands dirty, you can put together an Asterisk box. You would need an older PC that has several full size PCI slots available (free-$300), a PCI FXO card (for your telephone line) ($200-$300), and several inexpensive IP phones, such as the Grandstream Budgetone ($100/ea). Again, this system is not for the faint of heart, and there are known difficulties with getting these systems to work from behind a firewall. A commercial approach that is similar to this, but doesn't have the headaches of setup is http://www.fonality.com. Their entry-level server product is $995.

Ok, the last one. If you are not set on having a traditional dedicated, owned piece of hardware, you could save a lot of the cost of entry by trying out a hosted PBX service, such as Ringcentral or
pbxes.org. I have no experience with this, but it may be right for a small company, with no "central office" per se. One disadvantage I can think of is that you are depended entirely on your ISP, and someone else's phone system, to maintain your business' communications. Should they have a company-wide failure, or "spontaneously" go out of business and pull the plug one day (like SunRocket recently did to their residential customers), you are down for the count. Nonetheless, they claim to have service starting at $9.95. If you check this out, please let me know how goes.

Good luck

First Post - Ubuntu Samba PDC/ OpenLDAP

Welcome to Partis Scientia. In case you haven't figured it out, that is Latin for sharing of skill/knowledge. Let's start with a Linux post:

After almost 2 months, I finally got a Samba PDC running with an LDAP directory... I used an Ubuntu 6.06LTS (Dapper) server. The most confusing thing about it is that you have like 4 possible superuser roles to understand:

root on the linuxbox (/etc/passwd file)
LDAP admin
Samba admin (better known as Windows "Administrator")
Samba root (same as above. Discussed in a bit)

Here's what I used for resources
---------------------------------
The main howto that I followed was:
http://times.usefulinc.com/2005/09/25-ldap

It basically covers it all. It made setting up the LDAP very straightforward (although there were many steps). Then I had some problems getting the Samba PDC it to work, so I used one or more of the below docs to figure out what I was doing.

Here's some other docs I found helpful to when I was completely lost:
http://en.opensuse.org/Howto_setup_SUSE_as_SAMBA_PDC_with_OpenLDAP,_DYNDNS_and_CLAM
http://www.howtoforge.com/samba_setup_ubuntu_5.10

Snags I hit
-------------------------------

One thing that really threw me was that the first howto claims you will have an account called "Administrator" as the domain admin. Well the version of smbldap-tools that I was using created an account "root" as the domain admin. I later found a posting somewhere that said this is a better idea anyway:

"Please note that a side effect of Administrator with UID=0 as well as root
with UID=0 is that login name to UID and login name to SID resolution is no
longer unambiguous. This will break winbindd big time in critical situations.

The best advice is to have just 'root' with UID=0 and use 'root' as the domain
administrator account. The new privileges capability can be used to delegate
some administrative functions, such as adding machines to the domain, to
accounts other than 'root'."

-Machines don't automatically get a machine account created by Samba when you join a new workstation to the domain. You have to do it manually, period. It's not hard, but just plan on it. smbldap-useradd -w machine_name$

-When joining a new computer to the domain, you have to log in the first time as the domain admin (on that computer), when prompted. A user account will come up as not found or access denied.

Things I plan on attacking next
-------------------------------
-phpldapadmin
-roaming profiles
-print serving