Topic: My Experience -FWIW

[David Pennycuick]

Hi

This post is for the benefit of those who are where I was 2 weeks ago... ie thinking about using e-Smith / SME 5.5

Things that are good:

Installation and initial set up takes about 35mins on a P4 1.8 gHz pc.  Getting the users, groups and iBays set up takes a bit longer.....  just don't call the ibays the same name as the groups.

Ecrix VXA-1 IDE Tape drive works straight out of the box with no configuration effort required.  Mine is set as master on the secondary ide bus.  Mind you, flexbackup (dump) still breaks occasionally for no good reason I can see...... gives broken pipe error.  Rerun the backup and all is usually good.

Raid 1 is easy although I am not really getting much redundancy since they are Master / slave on the same IDE bus.  I would probably be better off simply leaving the  spare drive sitting unplugged in the box.....

The web Server-Manager works well and is easy to follow

I use 'putty' to SSH into the box for command line work. Not that I can do too much being new to linux....

Things that are not so good.....

The Email Retrieval seems to me to be tricky to get my head around.  I don't think it works quite right so I am leaving my users to get their own mail direct with Outlook Express.

Things I don't use......

The gateway and print server.  I use a hardware router / print sharer because the server has to live in an out of the way place.

Thanks to all who contribute to this group  - the info here has been of enormous assistance

Regards

David

[Laurence Griffiths]

From my personal experience, the POP3 retrieval from a multidrop mailbox seems to be broken in Ver 5.5. "Standard" email retrieval works well.

Provided you apply Updates 1 & 2, the rest looks fairly solid. Performance seems to be fairly decent too!

The print sharer works well and I have even managed to get an SME server to act as a print server for an HP Plotter which is plugged into the LAN via an HP Jet Direct card.

Once you have an SME server set up properly, it runs happily for months (or even years) on end without any further drama. - That is more than I can say for Microsoft's offerings which seem to fall over on a fairly regular basis!

[Ray Mitchell]

I would also add that if you have printers which connect to your network cabling you can set them up as Hosts in server manager, the server box can physically be anywhere then.

I disagree with disconnecting one drive, perhaps you don't have protection from bus failure, but you do have protection from hard disk surface failure, which seems somewhat more prevalent.
Ideally you should have each drive as a master on seperate buses, surely your lovely new P4 box has 2 buses.

I have my sme box under the table the printers are on, which plug directly into the server, right next to the UPS, and it is mostly controlled remotely from a workstation, very rarely do I connect directly to the box, you can leave the keyboard disconnected if you want.


Regards
Ray Mitchell

[David Pennycuick]

You're right about the raid disc of course. I am at least a bit better off with them both spinning...

I was told the the tape drive wanted to be master on an IDE bus, and I wasn't sure how the HD performance would be if the CDROM was slaved on the same.

The server is not in production yet, so its not too late for me to swap things around if there would be a benefit.........

Thanks

David