Mercian Labels-a UK SME Label Printer on Open Source migration

We just had a minor crisis with our dedicated server (thanks to Fasthosts sceurity breech and the subsequent roor password changes) and I’ve learnt these new shell comands:

postfix flush

flushes the mailqueue

du --max-depth=1 /home/ | sort -n -r 

lists the sizes of folder when you cannt work out where all the massive log files are located!

find /home/default/selfadhesivelabels.com/system/mail/users/spam/Maildir/new -name ‘*.*’ -print0 | xargs -0 rm

deletes all our stored spam  (when you have over 100,000 to delete and normal rm dosnt work!)

I hope this is useful for someone.

The title says it all, December is a quiet time of year for us and so we planned and executed a smooth transiation to Zimbra from Outlook 2000.  It went very well, and whilst there are changes for the users and some learning, there are benefits as well as drawbacks in the move.

As we are SILL on v4.5 (come on Zimbra team, we want 5.0!) our users are currenly missing the following features:

1. the ability to access a communal mailbox (our “sales” account) without using 2 different browsers - due to be fixed in v5.0
2. the ability to use html signatures -   due to be fixed in v5.0
3. attaching multiple attachments is slower using zimbra rather than outlook
4. the signature field is only 1024 characters, and our disclaimer is longer than that (thank UK law for this), and on first try the zimbra disclaimer add on recently promoted on their blog didnt work for us

Apart from these issues, its all gone perfectly.  Again, its a good feeling.

We have 3 migrations left to go.  Our MIS (massive project) due from 2 January, then the phone system using trixbox, and finally all the OSs from  W2K to ubuntu (Q1 2008)

My home PC is an old Dell machine with a 40GB IDE hard drive.  Having just bought a new 160GB drive for backups from my laptop, I couldnt work out how to install and configure it in Ubuntu as it dosnt recognise the presence of a new drive on startup.

So, I again used GPARTED , and booted up the machine using GPARTED and formatted the drive that way as a new ext3 format.  Now its recognised as a spare disk in /media which works fine.

one final tip for novice users like me, if you want to make a directory to start with and the disk is blank, its esy to to this at the command line when Ubuntu wont let you.

go to ./media/disk directory

sudo mkdir NEWDIRECTORYNAME

chmod 777 NEWDIRECTORYNAME

This is very loose security, but if its just a home PC with no other access I thoguht this would be fine.

I hope this helps someone.  If you an expert user and can comment further, please feel free.

We’ve started migrating individual users across to Zimbra, despite V5.0 still not being released (I’ve got fed up of waiting).  So far all is well, but there are some problems that I hope to resolve when we do move to v5.0 later this month.

• users signatures are limited to 1024 (or thereabouts) characters.  This is a problem, as we cannt fit our disclaimer in it.  There is a new disclaimer hack, but we couldn’t get it to work, but wil try with senokian with v5.0
• HTML templates are needed by some people
• read receipts would be nice!

There is also the issue of accessing multiple accounts.  This feature appears to be in v4.5x but we cannt get it to work.  Hopefully we can fix this, as its very useful to access a group “sales” mailbox, as we do with Outlook currently.

3 users down, 8 to go. ..