As mentioned in a previous post, Saskaweb is looking for additional space.  We’re in talks with our current landlord for another server room but there might be a snag.

They’re not too keen on running lines between our existing space and the new space.  The workaround they offer is a VLAN on their switches between the two spaces.  The fee for this VLAN and the additional connections is reasonable and each link would be 100Mb.  But……

Saskaweb uses VLANs for our Saskatoon colocation service, managed hosting, and VPS hosting.  We can’t put our trunk on their VLAN.  Or can we….

From a brief read, L2TPv3 might be exactly what we need.  Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol should allow me to send a trunk over their 100Mb VLAN’ed line.  Of course there are some catches:

1. Specs weren’t easy to find, but I’ll bet there’s a performance hit:  I can’t believe we’d get wire speed and the risks of fragmentation could stress the router CPUs
2. No VTP.  Not a deal-breaker as we keep up-to-date documentation on all our VLANs, but still a bit of a pain.
3. I’ve never set up L2TPv3 before

I guess number 3 shouldn’t be considered a catch — the only days where a sysadmin doesn’t learn something new are holidays.

Saskaweb is currently in talks to obtain more space.  We’d like to get some extra racks up to handle more drive arrays and better manage power requirements.  We’re still shopping around but hope to be adding new equipment within the next couple months!

We’ve decided on Novastor for our online backup service.  The interface isn’t much and there aren’t as many options as we’d expect for the price, but it does the job and it does it well.  The bit-level copy shrinks the backup considerably and the compression does a pretty good job at making the most of the ever-shrinking backup window.

Our current plan is to use Novastor for the following services:

• Offsite backup for workstation/workgroup environments that have too much data for our standard backup client
• As part of our server management service
• Offsite backup for server environments

The pricing will be customized to the data retention period and diskspace requirements of the client.

Saskaweb is pleased to announce the launch of our new support ticketing system!  The system is email based and will generate a new ticket ID for each support request.  Additional information can be appended to each ticket by replying to the relevant ticket (instructions enclosed with each ticket request).

We now encourage our users to submit their requests to:  helpdesk@saskaweb.com.

We chose osticket (http://osticket.com) because it was very simple and fulfilled our current requirements.

For companies wishing to deploy their own trouble ticket systems, I’d encourage you to have a look at osticket.com.  If you are a current Saskaweb hosting client, we’d be happy to set up a demo for you. 

 Saskaweb can host your support ticket system:  Current hosting clients can have a ticket system like osticket hosted for no additional monthly charge!  The only charge would be the initial setup fee ($75/hour).  For requests please contact (you guessed it):  helpdesk@saskaweb.com

We’re trying out NovaStor software for our Saskatoon offsite backup business.  Our first trial went well, the NovaStor allows you to stage your backup files (you can copy the initial full to a removable disk so you don’t have to swamp their internet for a few days).  I was a bit unimpressed by the lack of a manual selection list, but the backup went well and I’ll try restoring later next week.

The price point is a bit steeper than our usual software, but the options look good.  If they work as advertised, it’ll be worth it!

I just finished http://www.rollotherm.ca.  They’re a Saskatoon, Saskatchewan company that manufactures and installs roll shutter systems.  They’ve installed both manual and automatic roll shutters in residential, commercial, and vacation property — both inside and out.  Besides, the project went well and Gil was a pleasure to work with!

check them out:  http://www.rollotherm.ca

Had to do a pressing Windows 2008 install for a client in a bind.  They purchased a VLK through Open licensing – and lucky, it worked right away.  That’s where the luck stopped!

The server I was installing it on didnt have a DVD drive and unfortunately, they only DVD drive I have is in my workstation.  Download 2008 R2, burn it, turn off workstation, install DVD in server, boot.

Oh great.  R2 apparently is only 64-bit and this old beastie server is only 32-bit.  Go to VLSC and download Server 2008 SP2 x86/x64.  Over 2 gigs — another 1.5 hours.  Reinstall DVD burner in workstation, burn it, turn off workstation, install DVD in server, boot.

Lovely!  The DVD isn’t bootable.  Turn off server, re-install DVD burner in workstation, investigate.  Nice!  I just downloaded a 2 gigabyte SERVICE PACK!  Woohoo.

Download Windows Server 2008 WITH service pack 2 (I missed the WITH before).  Another 1.5 hours.  Burn it, turn off workstation, install DVD in server, go to bed.

I think I should’ve just skipped to the “go to bed” part

Thanks Microsoft for taking down EOpen BEFORE having the new system functioning.  Can’t download software, can’t access my VLKs.

Thanks — I guess that’s what we get for the thousands we spend on Microsoft’s products!

Saskaweb has recently commited to start offering alternatives to our hosted Microsoft services.  The second groupware software we’ll be checking out is from Bynari.

I’ve become more and more interested in their products as I browse their site and skim the manuals.  Here’s my lowdown of the Bynari Exchange alternative system:

• The Insight connector allows for calendar, task, and folder sharing from Outlook 2000-2007 to a range of open source IMAP servers.  It’s a commercial product but priced quite nicely and is certainly enticing enough to do a demo
• The Insight Addressbook provides contact sharing from Outlook with a compatible LDAP backend.  It’s VERY inexpensive.
• The Insight Server provides an easy-to-install and manage collection of opensource software:  Cyrus IMAP, openLDAP, Postfix, Apache… you can probably guess the rest.  There are some interesting plugins available for the server like Mobility for smartphones and an archiving addon

So it’s certainly interesting enough to warrant a trial setup which will hopefully happen within the next week.

Saskaweb IT Solutions is currently investigating open-source groupware applications as part of our goal to offer an opensource alternative to all of our hosted Microsoft services.  The first package we reviewed is EGroupware.  EGroupware is a PHP/database driven website that offers a wide range of groupware services.  Unfortunately, it does not appear to fulfill our groupware requirements because of weaknesses with client synchronization.  We want a drop-in Exchange replacement that would ideally work with Outlook, or at least something like Thunderbird.

First let’s start out with what’s good about EGroupware:

1. Very active development
2. Already has a ton of features and being PHP, should customize easily
3. Community driven (this project appears to embrace the best of open source ideals)
4. Supports mail authentication (authenticates off existing IMAP) making this a drop-in replacement for our existing webmail
5. apt-get install egroupware.  Wow — now that’s easy to install!

As mentioned, the big bad is that EGroupware doesn’t really work with Outlook and if it did, it sure wouldn’t work with Outlook 2010, and if it did it sure would be flaky…. You see where I’m going.  This level of support for Outlook is a serious mark against EGroupware and what makes it a dealbreaker is that there don’t seem to be any Windows email clients that work reliably with it.  Admittedly, I’m going off of forum reports and did not exhaustively check all combinations but if we’re going to recommend this to our clients it has to work well and I did NOT feel that.

We will start offering EGroupware as a webmail alternative for our email hosting because it does have a ton of features.  As for an Exchange alternative though, not at this time