Topic: Small company - several offices - email setup difficulties!

[Dave Dumolo]

Dear Readers,

I would be interested to know if anyone has solved this situation - one that I keep coming up against!

A small company has two branch offices - one in York and one in Newport Pagnell, say. Because it is one company every employee wants an e-Mail address of the form @small.company - in fact the management insists on it!  Now, over here in the UK it's VERY expensive to have permanent Internet connections and so almost everyone in the private and small business community has either 56K modem or 64K ISDN dial-up connections to an ISP. This makes it difficult for 'small company' to host it's own domain stuff and so typically this is done by the ISP. Thus www.small.company is hosted at the ISP and all the mail - either individual accounts or multidrop - for small.company is also received and stored by the ISP. So far so good!

Now this is where I may have got things wrong but I don't think so.

If I now put an SME-Server into, say, the York office then, in order for the e- Mail addresses @small.company to be valid I need either for the local server to be the host for domain small.company or I need to define a virtual domain of that name. This enables me (a) to send e-Mails within the office to any valid user and (b) to fetch and deliver any e-Mails from the ISP addressed to local users.

I can do the same in my Newport Pagnell branch office and things work there too - provided that only York OR Newport Pagnell access the ISP mail system at any one time - difficulty number 1! Even if that can be overcome a further difficulty arises when an employee at York wants to send an e-Mail to an employee at Newport Pagnell. The domain is recognised as 'local' by the sending machine and the e-Mail is returned because the recipient doesn't exist. I've solved this problem in a couple of installations by building my own server and using Exim as the MTA - this allows for such situations. However, I would rather use SME servers if at all possible as this would propagate a good product and save me a rake of work.

Please let me know if this situation can be handled using a standard SME server and that I've simply misunderstood the situation (RTFM?)- or, alternatively, any chance of getting Exim available in SME server as an option?

Regards,


Dave Dumolo

[brian read]

Dave

I am also in the UK, and dealing with the same situation.  However I disagree with one point.  Permanent internet connections are no longer expensive here.  What about ADSL? (30ukp per month, all in).  This means you could then solve your problem with a FreeSwan VPN between the servers, whereby only one of them runs the mail server.

Cheers

Brian

[Dave Dumolo]

Brian,

I agree about ADSL and VPN - but you try getting ADSL when you're 10 miles from the city centre! The BT attitude is "if you hillbillies think that you're going to get ADSL in the next 5 years - think again!" I was quoted £32K for provision of a kilostream link, however, and I thought that a tad expensive! So, we've got ADSL in one office and a newly installed, centrally heated pidgeon loft in the other! So much for our premier comms provider! Oh, we tried ISDN too - but found that we got better throughput on a 56K modem!!!!

Regards,

Dave.

[brian read]

Dave

Yes, ADSL provision is a problem I must admit. I can't understand why you "got better throughput from a modem than ISDN though"  I had been on ISDN for about a year before going ADSL (having been on 56k modem before), and there is no doublt that ISDN was a lot faster than the modem.  Surely the digital technology guaratees you a 64kb connection?  If the internet / ISP is slow then a modem won't make any difference anyway.

If one end is ADLS, then how about a PPTP type VPN connection incoming from the remote site?  The latter preferably ISDN (with one of the pay upfront deals whereby you don't get hammered for call charges).  It can dial/VPN in to deliver and pick up email.

Cheers

Brian

[Manuelazo]

but what happends when both offices are behind an e-smith server?? I have red that you can vpn the office1 from office2, but two or more concurrent connections is no longer possibe with pptp, the only way to do it is if your office1 has two or more IP, so each user on office2 logs with each IP!!

Correct me if I'm wrong, I just red this, but never try to confirm!! if you can pptp from 2 or more clients behind an e-smith server to another e-smith server (VPN server), please tell us!!

Thanks!!

[bob]

Did you look into using IPSEC vpn with Free/swan?

http://myezserver.com/downloads/mitel/contrib/freeswan-0.4/freeswan-howto.html

Bob

[Graham]

UK2.net are really cheap on domains [£30 :: You can forward mail
where you like]

I got round' same prob by registering :-

Sub Office = www.office.myco.com
Main office = www.myco.com

Not ideal but it works and saves you a headache . . .

[Lazo]

I have dynamic IP, and I'm waiting for ADSL (still dynamic), I just wondering if pptp over e-smith work with two or more concurrent users!!!.

[sander]

isn't it in the setup (in remote access) where you can specify how many pptp clients can connect?

I think You have it currently set to 2

Try setting it to how many simultanious connections you require.

To dave:
setup sme mailserver to the adsl office and have modem users connect to that with their mail clients. Tell the sme to recieve mail from your isp or be the default mailserver.

hope this helps

sander
don't be mad if i am way off

[Andrei Taylor]

I have had up to 35 concurrent connections on my SME Server via PPTP with no Problems (dial up & DSL connections) Separate accounts setup up for each (63 total users) user on my corporate main server. I have individual 3 SME Servers setup for file and printer sharing at the remote sites because it would suck to have to pull 2 MB spread sheets acrooss 56k dial up. Also we utilize Citrix Metaframe so that users can be more productive with less bandwidth on the applications side and also be able to print docs to printers at the main corp. site.

[Dave Dumolo]

Just a note of thanks to all who replied. Ther are a few ideas here worth checking out.

Thanks!

Dave