Michael Jay Lissner

The New Computer and The Giveaway Pile

2007-10-23T00:13:23-07:00

A few weeks back, I mentioned that I was having some trouble setting up the Zimbra Suite on my server. I finally got it to work, but it wasn’t as reliable as I needed it to be. When I looked into the problem, it seemed I just needed a newer computer to run it. Apparently they were serious when they talked about the minimum hardware requirements (who knew?).

I thought about just running a lighter-weight piece of software, but after I priced it out, I learned that I could get a new computer (sans monitor, keyboard, speakers, mouse and hard drives) for only $350. So I did. I just finished putting it together* and getting Zimbra working again (which was easy since I used the old hard drives), and now I’ve got a give away pile.

Here’s the list:

One computer, sans hard drive. It’s a P3, it’s got about a gig of RAM, graphics card, integrated ethernet. The case is a beaut, but it weighs in at about 20 lbs. If you get it a set of matched processors, it’s actually kind of fast -
A P3 processor and heat sink
Four SDRAM spacers
Working keyboard
Two DSL Modems

And that’s it. That computer could work well for somebody that does light computing. The rest is probably garbage, but you never know. Any takers?

*The specs, in case somebody is interested, are meager, but still infinitely faster than the predecessor. The new computer is a Intel Duo, 2.13Ghz ($150), 2GB of RAM ($70) and cheap motherboard with integrated video, sound and ethernet ($40).

A Boring Confession

2007-09-29T16:34:53-07:00

I need a heatsink for the mail server. Stupid thing keeps crashing. It’s got two Pentium III processors. Anybody have one they want to mail me? My birthday is coming up…sort of…

Zimbra Done. Worth the Wait? Yes.

2007-09-29T16:20:59-07:00

I finally got Zimbra to work on Tuesday, and I must say it is one of the more frustrating things I have ever had to install. This isn’t Zimbra’s fault though - My rudimentary knowledge of DNS makes mail serving rather challenging. My main two difficulties when installing Zimbra stemmed from 1) not opening ALL the ports on my router that I needed to, and 2) assorted DNS difficulties mentioned above.

Now that it is working reliably though, I’m quite pleased with it, and I’ve realized that it’s so excellent that I am going to have to move all my mail accounts over to it very soon. It has a couple of rather pleasing functions that I’m excited about. The first is LDAP, which allows me to have the same contact list no matter how or where I get my mail.

The second, and probably more important feature is Transport Layer Security (TLS) which creates a level of encryption between me and my server so that if an email gets as far as my server without getting eavesdropped upon, it can go that last bit of the journey from the server to me without any worries. This is a feature that for some reason I never had before now, and I’m quite glad to have it, just in case.

Other than that, it’s nice to finally have webmail that’s good enough that I have to think to myself about whether or not I want to check my mail in Thunderbird or Firefox. What a concept.

Chronicals of installing Zimbra, OR If it looks awesome, it’s probably a pain to install.

2007-09-14T00:24:56-07:00

First of all, check this out. Use the username ‘admin’ and the password ‘zcsadmin’. When you’re done there, come back here, and pick up where you left off.

It’s pretty sweet right? Calendar functions, ajaxy goodness, tagging, searching, etc. Pretty much all you could want from a web email client, right? Right. So I figured I’d download and install it. The first thing that worried me was that it wasn’t in the repositories of Ubuntu software, so it wasn’t just a sudo aptitude install zimbra away. So I downloaded it to /usr/src, unpacked it, found the install script (install.sh), and began the magic (cd /usr/src/zsc; sudo ./install .sh)

Aside from the fact that my CPU overheated about 20 times while downloading the Zimbra Suite (apparently it needed thermal grease and a heat sink realignment), all went well until the install script got to resolving my MX records, hostname, /etc/hosts file, etc. Apparently figuring these out is a bloody pain in the ass (forgive the imagery, I mean it in the British sense) . So for the past few days I’ve been struggling with getting this figured out, and the point of this post is, if you’ve been sending emails to any @michaeljaylissner.com address, I’m ashamed to say, they’re not going through. But you probably have realized this, because they’re bouncing back to you. Well, now you know why.

Give me a couple more days, I’m working on it. In the mean time, the contact link does work.