Topic: SME replacement?

[ryan]

I don't know about anyone else, but 5.6 is the worst release of e-smith I have seen.  PPTP between a 5.6 and a 5.6 is still unreliable.  Has anyone found another distro that is more stable and provides similar features?  I wish we could go back to the days before Mitel acquired e-smith, when this forum had real answers and solutions.

[Greg]

I have made the choice not to go to 5.6 , I will only install 5.5 as everything I need works. I spent so much time on 5.6 that I could have done it with Micro$oft Windows saved money.

[Greg]

Don't get me wrong I have no pronblem with E-Smith it has been a life saver. I know of no platform I can have installed in 30 minutes or so and be back online and do it all over the phone with a receptionist. You can't beet that for beeing able to sleep at night.

[ryan]

Hi Greg,

Yes I agree, E-smith 4.1 saved my butt in a brand new job when the past net admin (who was fired) remotely shut down all the linux he built.  I discovered e-smith and was up and running with a internet gateway in a day....I even returned to e-smith after setting up Microsoft proxy servers and realized the performance loss with Microsoft.  That was 2 years ago.  E-smith just worked, simple as that.  I can't say that for 5.6.  If future SME releases continue to get worse, they will not be useable.  

Today, I am at home and can't connect to the 5.6 pptp box at work.  I can't reboot it during business hours either..so I am stuck.  SSH works fine, but I need to be on the lan.  Mitel has suggested everyone upgrade to 5.6, yet many in the forums and other sites say PPTP just does not work.  Why does Mitel not just pull the release and fix it...or admit it is not of a final release quality and hold off on upgrading.  I also can't get LDAP to work on 5.6.  I find it ironic that the older versions are better than 5.6...this is backwards if you ask me.  

I might consider downgrading to 5.5 or possibly clark connect.  Anyone have input regarding clark connect?  

Enough rant....but 5.6 has me very frustrated...I regret upgrading my 5.1.2 servers.

ryan

[ryan]

Can SME 5.5 be restored with a desktop backup from 5.6?

[Cyrus Bharda]

I have decided not to upgrade to 5.6 as well, but only because I do not need any of the major changes made if I upgrade.

That and my 5.5 box has performed flawlessly, well 95% of the time, for about 6 months now.

My major beef is trying to find the time to test all the contrib rpm's to see if they work on 5.6 and finding 5.6 ones if they dont, I just don thave the time to do that, so the choice was easy for me, stay with 5.5

Cyrus Bharda

[guestHH]

I have to agree that 'upgrading'to version 5.6 with or without updates is a disapointing experience.

Why not seperate 'feature updates' and real 'security updates' and 'version update' so there is a choice...

Concering the pptp issue I'm stuck too, also with frozen servers. Whatever file I search, there's no info in the log files to determine what is wrong.

I wish I stayed with 5.5, but eventually that version wil not be 'supported'as well or get's labeled 'end of life'.

Something is defenitely 'not 100% OK' with version 5.6 U4. But I can't figure out why, but am very willing to help out...

I hope Mitel can speak up.

Regards,
guestHH

[Craig Jensen]

I love SME and it's flexibility, but...

PPTP has been 'the' major issue since 5.6 was released.  The 'security updates' in April indicate that Mitel is indeed looking at PPTP...

I have not had a need for PPTP until very recently.  It's stability issue has me waiting for a future update/fix.

Charlie, Gordon, or someone from Mitel, where might we help with this issue?


Craig Jensen

[Mark]

Like everyone else I have had significant problems early on with 5.6 pptp however I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water. In my limited experience I have found the ext3 file system less breakable (many a time I have had to walk customers through fscking a 5.5 box after a power failure via the telephone ) and it seems to me that samba performance is better on 5.6 (op lock settings maybe?).  

I am running a 5.6 box at home (with 240gigs of customer data and movies etc) and its pptp link from my 2k server at work has been up for 53 hours (since I rebooted after my last fiddle) without a hitch. I can also (simultaneously) connect from my desktop via pptp through the 5.6 box to another customers 5.6 box and stay online as long as I need so its not all bad.  I still can find anything suprior out there and I have spent a lot of time looking.

   Thanks Charlie, Gordon and all at Mitel for the best "all in one" package out there

cheers

Mark

[James Roberts]

'..I have found the ext3 file system less breakable (many a time I have had to walk customers through fscking a 5.5 box after a power failure via the telephone )...'

True, but shouldn't a file server be on a UPS? (Belkin basic for about 45 USD, 42 EUR). And I've been running ext3, Reiser and the rest on various machines for a few years now... don't know why it wasn't introduced earlier.

'...its not all bad. I still can find anything suprior out there and I have spent a lot of time looking.'

Of course it's not all bad. It's a 'great deal' if you are happy with what's in the box, PITA otherwise.

However, e-smith have always been an avowedly commercial distribution - and it's their call, of course...(subject to GPL-ish-ness). They have a perfect right to adjust their support to that goal. Most of what we're all trying to do (I reckon) is add the features that are missing in the GPL but supplied with their commercial package Their only obligation is to provide the GPL'd source - at our cost.

That said, in our experience, 5.5 has been a win and 5.6 a backward step. We're on 5.5 everywhere and not upgrading any installations to 5.6.

All RedHat-based distributions have recently received a few wake-up calls anyway. I'm from Europe, and RedHat is not the 'big hat' here...

Once you have learned Linux, it's possible to see that all Linux-based distros have more in common than they differ (and a large part of the RH system is BSD-based anyway, so Free/Open/NetBSD are within grasp too...).

SME/e-smith is still our best bet as an out-of-the-box, but we're developing our own solutions - on the back burner - just-in-case...

Incidentally, we did contact Mitel service again re: being resellers - and *still* no replies... thrice is enough, no? Moved on now...

[Michiel]

> Incidentally, we did contact Mitel service again re: being
> resellers - and *still* no replies... thrice is enough, no?
> Moved on now...

They just don't want to sell, do they? Same experience overhere...

[Greg]

I just bought some Mitel 5055 SIP Vo/IP phones from them and there fine but, now I'm looking at one of there systems to expand the Vo/IP into our phone system and am a bit afraid of it with all the 5.6 problems.
Anyone have any experience with Mitel systems.

[João Vaz Martins]

I had the same PPTP problem when I instaled 5.6.

But then I aplied Update 4 and my PPTP problems vanished.

Did you aplied Update 4??

Best Regards

Joao Martins

[dave]

I too have decided not to upgrade to 5.6, the main reason being the contribs I have running work and there's been many comments about incompatibilities between existing contributions and 5.6.   I do work from home occationally using VPN to connect to work, I don't know enough about the issues/problems with 5.6 to know if it would effect me if I did upgrade but I don't want to take the chance.

That having been said, I would still recommend SME for most any small to medium sized installation.  It has been extremely reliable and I've had absolutely no problems with it since installation.  And, I do have my gateway on a UPS that has dropped out on me a couple times now (last night was #2 - it's an APC smart 700, possibly a battery issue, not certain yet).  In both instances, SME has booted up, noted the improper shut down, automatically run the fsck processes and recovered completely.  

SME has been one of the best tools I have found in my search for a replacement for Windows 2000 server.  It's an excellent product even with the problems that have been noted here on the message boards related to 5.6.

... Just my opinions ...

[Andy Parkinson]

Apart from the pptp problems which seem to be cured for me since U4  I think 5.6 is excellent. Samba is better and large file sizes appear to work ok now. I have about 30 5.6 servers in the field now and they all function like a dream. I just wish that I could say the same for all the Microsoft servers that I maintain. Ryan says that it is the worst release and it is unstable and unreliable yet I have almost no problems with reliability. He also makes the comment that  answers are not forthcoming on the forum but again I have always had satisfactory answers.  I don't believe that there is a product out there to match SME that is GPL'd.  I'd like to say thanks to everyone at Mitel for a great product.

[jules]

as to the original question, ClarkConnect is a pretty similar distro (headless gateway/email/web/ftp/file server). based more closely on redhat, it leans towards simple 'apt-get' for functional enhancements/modularity. I think they've also got a better view on what's gpl & what's-extra-but-not-too-expen$ive. it has had some lingering PPPoE issues for some issues (then again, so has SME)

[guestHH]

ok guys,

let's get things straight:

1. Mitel SME server is 1 of the best out of the box disto's out there
2. Mitel does a great deal about support for commercial as wel as non commercial users
3. Every update has his advantages _and_ disadvantages
4. Every use(userbase) c.q. setup c.q. expectation/environment is different
5. Not all of us are experts
6. There are _many_ dependencies, parties en products to cope with

That being said, I feel that there _are_ issues with 5.6U4. I really want to help, but as Mitel told me, things ain't goin'to be fix by the comment 'it doesn't work'.

Please provide all available info as much as you can about _your_ problems. Maybe we should start a 'debug 5.6U4 project' on contribs.org before we kill these boards.

So, questions:
A: Are you willing to help?
B: Are you willing provide details about your problems
C: Are you willing to test to the best of your abilities
D: Are you willing to share all info

then, start a 'project' on contribs.org and we all can post the findings on these boards.

Please don't flame me, i'm just trying to figure out the best way to serve us all.

go here: http://wiki.contribs.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=50#50
to start working on it.

Thanks for you efforts.
Regards,
guestHH

[Who Knew]

SME :

S neaky
M icrosoft
E verywhere?

[Dub Dublin]

RequestedDeletion is  absolutely right - we need to work together to try and figure out what is so badly broken (at least for most of us) with PPTP in 5.6.

Here's my story:

2 SME 5.5 servers, with minor modifications (user panel, devinfo update panel, etc.)

Both upgraded to 5.6, then U4 immediately applied. (I have NOT applied the PPOE patch in the subdirectory  under the RPMs directory in U4 - is that required for PPTP to work?  I don't think so, and the U4 upgrade instructions don't make it seem necessary, since they make no mention of that directory at all.)

The 5.6 upgrade process blew away all the non-standard panels in server-manager on one machine (the one that had trouble with the upgrade due to the bug that you can't upgrade with only 64 MB of RAM - search for my previous post on this), but they persisted on the other one.  Weird.

Anyway, after the 5.6 upgrade and applying U4, PPTP refuses to work at all, under any circumstances, on both machines, giving only the "unhelpful" (as Donald Rumsfeld would say) message from a Windows client PC, "Error: 645 Dial-Up Networking could not complete the connection to the server. Check your configuration and try the connection again."

I have also scoured logs and such looking for a clue, but the fact is that PPTP worked fine under 5.5, and does not work at all (at least for me) under 5.6.

I'll post more info if and when I learn more.  Right now, there's not much to go on.  I'll try running some process I/O traces as soon as I have time to unravel what programs get called to build the PPTP connection (and look up the Linux equivalent of trace/truss again - I never remember what it is..)  If someone already knows the programs involved here, post the info please, and we'll have a starting point, anyway.  Happy hunting.

[hanscees]

I do not want to be rude, but I think that if you add all kinds of non-supported things you cannot assume that an upgrade will work. Updates should, but upgrades not.

Nobody expects that programs still run going from windows nt to 2000 to xp. Similar esmith went to kernel 2.4 and thus if you are carefull you do an install from scratch and then move your data.

Having done that, if something does not work try to pin down what is not working and provide detailed logging and so on so it can be fixed. The place to do that is the bug-email address.

Having said that I would not recommend pptp at all, but ipsec and ssh from a security standpoint.

Last but not least I do agree that 5.6 is a more difficult beast because of its 2.4 kernel jump. If I was running production I would wait a while for a next version.

Just my 2 cents.

[hanscees]

>me and can't connect to the 5.6 pptp box at work. I can't reboot it during business >hours either..so I am stuck. SSH works fine, but I need to be on the lan.

You can use ssh to go anywhere on your lan. If you can get to the esmith box with ssh you can tunnel to your lan easily.

Use putty on your home windows machine or plain ssh if you have linux. Let your ssh forward you to the machine you need. You can set up multiple tunnels too.

If you then connect to the local port you defined you can do anything on your lan, from vncview to telnet to ftp to even netbios(wouldnt do that as the first tryout though). See ssh howtos on the web.

hc

[Michael Soulier]

guestHH wrote:
>
> Something is defenitely 'not 100% OK' with version 5.6 U4.
> But I can't figure out why, but am very willing to help out...

It would help to know more than, 'It's not working'. I recently tested pptp and found no problems, but I didn't leave the connection up for long. I could leave one overnight and see if it's still there in the morning, but it would really help if you provided detailed information.

Mike

[Alejandro Lengua]

PPTP is working for me fine on 5.6 U4, however the performance is poor.

I don't what to do to improve it.

Better cpu? lower encryption? disable encryption?

[Michael Soulier]

Alejandro Lengua wrote:
>
> PPTP is working for me fine on 5.6 U4, however the
> performance is poor.

That could be many, many different things.

> Better cpu? lower encryption? disable encryption?

Lower encryption won't work, since we require 128-bit. If you can't do 128-bit, you shouldn't be able to connect.

Disable encryption again won't work, but why is it that you'd like to take the 'P' out of VPN?

Finding bottlenecks can be hard. Look at bandwidth, cpu on both boxes, etc.

Mike