The search for a garage-friendly Outlook replacement

This quest started innocently enough - a desire to ditch Exchange Server and increasing frustration with Outlook. Managing an Exchange Server environment is a big enough job inside an enterprise - even when you can employ someone to do it. Now that I no longer own an international software business, I no longer have someone to run the servers for me - which shouldn't be a problem as theory suggests that life should have become somewhat simpler.

Not so ...

... I have developed multiple personalities - not in the hearing-voices sense but in my professional and personal activities. I'm out of touch with "consultant-speak" but I'd probably be described as a "multi-presenced" individual these days, what with the (now doubled) Maserati role, my music recording and my personal and business roles. Outlook had served me well for many years while I ran my company so, when I became "company-less" it was going to be a big drag to move to a less functional environment.

So, my garage became home to a small Exchange Server environment, initially on NT then a couple of years ago migrated to Windows Server 2003. Running it - especially keeping on top of the patches needed to keep it safe - became what felt like a full time job. It became increasingly obvious that Exchange was not a garage-friendly product. I don't mind if you ask why it took me so long to realise - I'd like to know myself!

What really killed Exchange Server for me was the number of bugs and open exploit holes and the ever increasing cost of upgrading. When it came to a decision about upgrading to Exchange 2003 the cost was prohibitive for my (relatively) humble needs.

The trouble is, if Exchange gets dropped, what happens to Outlook? The answer is that a lot of its functionality disappears. Let me look at what I do and don't like about Outlook:

Things I like about Outlook:

1. It brings most of the info I need daily into one place: Email, Contacts, Calendar, ToDo and Notes
2. Synchronisation between desktop PC, laptop and PocketPC are (suppposed to be) simple
3. It's reliable - even when it doesn't do what it's supposed to it does so consistently!

Things I didn't/don't like about Outlook

1. It really needs an Exchange Server back-end to work as advertised
2. It doesn't handle multiple identities - I need to originate and respond to emails acording to the 'hat' I'm wearing - eg, people who contact me via the Maserati Resource Centre should get messages from my MRC address.
3. I never did get it to integrate all its functions properly - not within itself let alone the rest of the MS Office suite. Even simple tasks (such as dragging an email to a ToDo list or calendar entry) never worked and as for being able to click on a contact to write a letter in Word with the address already copied across ... I gave up writing and editing the macros and VBA to do that after about the fifth change-of-mind within Microsoft.
4. It has no way to easily group tasks and ToDos into projects or sub-headings to cope with the way I work

Without Exchange Server, Outlook loses most of its - increasingly slender -appeal. While email can be stored on just about any server these days using IMAP to leave copies on the server and handle filing and archiving for later use, the same isn't true of contacts, calendar/diary, notes etc. In a non-Exchange environment, Outlook still offers these facilities but stores the data locally on the host workstation PC. Synchronising this data to a laptop and a Pocket PC becomes a royal PITA if you travel as often as I do.

Especially after having been used to it all just sort of happening.

A simple home network

Call me an old white-bearded geek but I continue to run a small cluster of servers at home - one main (Win2k3) server that provides LAN services and storage, another that acts as the mail and web development server here, another that runs Asterisk for the phone system, another NAS box that all the PCs here back up to. That's four if you're counting - all sitting in a nice rack powered by a big UPS.

Then there are the workstations: my lovingly crafted, SILENT workstation here in the study, the two in the recording studio, the laptops, the Sony VAIO Media Centre in the lounge (subject of another post before too long, I'm sure) the IPAQ pocket PC ... the media players ...

Networking this little lot is a bit of a problem as I'm currently (for a few more weeks at least) in a rented house so can't drill holes to run network cables between house and garage or between floors. I'm also stuck with the location where the phone line - and hence the broadband ADSL - comes into the building, in my study.

So the servers that talk to each other on their gigabit-LAN connect to the rest of the machines via a mains-borne network that is advertised to run at 85Mbps but actually runs at around 25Mbps on a good day. This mains-borne segment also has to carry the Internet traffic to and from the servers - including the phone traffic to the Asterisk box. The study has its own mini gigabit-LAN for the firewall, my main workstation, printers, the various IP phone devices etc. Finally, there's a WiFI segment driven off a Linksys WRT54GS with upgraded, open source firmware with a repeater to help cover the upper floor - that provides connection to the laptops and the machines in the music recording room upstairs.

Arriving at this mixed-bag approach to the network here took quite a while. The big problem is the connection between the house and garage. For practical reasons (noise, space) the server rack has to sit in the attached garage and there's no way to run a network cable between the two without causing problems with the landlord. My initial attempt used wireless links with a router in the house transmitting through the wall to the garage. Signal quality was appalling, however - maybe the wall has been lined with metal mesh or similar as the link was repeatedly dropped.

I went through several expensive antennae supposed to boost the signal along with equally expensive extension cables to locate the antennae as close to each other as possible with just that wall separating them - all to no avail. The link would still occasionally drop for no apparent reason.

Dropped links are not a good thing on the most critical segment of your network.

I stumbled across mains-borne networking while trawling the 'net looking for a solution to this problem. The units I bought came from Solwise (http://www.solwise.co.uk/net-powerline.htm) who have proved to be a nice company to deal with - one I'd heartily recommend - they quickly replaced one of the (now four) units I've bought from them when it stopped working.

So, are power line devices the networking panacea for the cable-free home or office?

Not quite. Apart from the hardware reliability (my one failed device might be an exception but the build quality of the plug-top units isn't that impressive) it's almost impossible to predict the actual throughput that can be achieved. In my case, I now have one of the units in the study that acts as the master and three slaves. I'll list them and their data rates as reported from the master unit:

• Garage - server farm - 27Mbps
• Lounge - media centre - 9Mbps
• Kitchen - WiFi router - 53Mbps
  

Note that none of the links is achieving the claimed 85Mbps transfer rate - the best rate is to the kitchen only about 20 feet of mains wiring away, while the garage (that sits on another mains ring the other side of the distribution panel) just manages half that - and less than a third of the claimed rate.

The stand-out oddity in the list is the lounge. As far as I can tell, this is on the same mains ring as the master but suffers interference from one of the PSUs that power some of the boxes surrounding the media centre or something else I haven't yet been able to track down.

It's interesting to note that even when plugged side-by-side, these units only manage about 60Mbps. I'd need to research the technology better to be certain about this but it seems to work on similar mechanisms to WiFi - only using the mains cable as its medium rather than radio waves. Of course, the carrier frequencies needed to carry network traffic at these rates has to be very high (in the GHz range, I suspect) so the mains wiring is surely acting as a very large radiator of UHF interference to the neighbourhood and, it would appear from the poor performance of the unit in the lounge here, the coupling of the power-line unit to the mains wiring is pretty critical.

Conclusions - if there are any from this?

• surprise, surprise - WiFi doesn't travel well through walls
  
• mains-borne networking can be a life saver - my garage link has proven reliable apart from the one hardware failure
• neither of these technologies replace a good old copper network cable

Solwise have been advertising a powerline device that's claimed to provide 200Mbps over mains cabling. Initially listed for release this summer, their web site now promises delivery some time in October. Had these devices been available earlier I would certainly have tried at least one pair on the garage link but as I'm hoping to move out of this rented place before too long, the £150 cost will go a long way toward a drum of CAT-6 cable and some fascia outlets.

Of printers

Last week also saw me finally install the new Xerox Phaser 6100 colour laser printer I had ordered before leaving for the States. Bought as an end-of-run bargain complete with extra paper tray this machine replaces the venerable HP5100 mono whose noise and smell finally got the better of me (donated to a local school where it will, I'm sure, continue to do sterling work for years to come) and the HP4500 colour laser recently recovered from my ex-wife in non-working condition.

I had initially hoped that the HP4500 would become my main work-horse printer after I'd got it working again with a thorough clean, removal of the jammed paper that was wrapped many, many times round the fuser(!) and replacement of a couple of cartridges but it was not to be. Just days after I'd started to use it, the machine demanded a new set of imaging belt etc. and the cost of these items for what remains an oldish device - and one that may yet have thrown up further problems - swung me into looking for a replacement. The offer of the Phaser 6100 at a price just a few pounds more than the cost of the replacement parts for the HP made the decision easy.

So far, I have to say I'm extremely pleased with the Xerox machine. It warms up faster than the old HP, produces very acceptable print quality for my needs (mainly general office printing and correspondence) prints duplex to save paper and doesn't smell. Best of all - in power-save mode it is SILENT.

Bliss!

Back home (can I go away again ... please?)

Back from the USA and, after a brief, hectic but most pleasant interlude entertaining and being entertained by Aussie friends it's back to the grindstone. I have a mountain of letters, emails and phone calls to write / make / do following the U.S. trip and the small matter of a magazine to put together over the next few weeks.

I returned from the States to find that one of the hard disks in one of the servers here had crashed, losing the entire content of my software repository. No biggie - all the machines here are backed up at least nightly to the big NAS server so the task involved no more than installing a replacement hard drive and restoring from the backup. A new 320GB drive was duly ordered and installed and (thanks to Acronis) with just a little bit of fiddling with Windows drive letters all the data (about 150GB) was back on the server in pretty quick order - though it could have been quicker had I installed the gigabit ethernet cards I had intended to buy a while ago - a job for later this month, methinks, especially as the network switch in the garage has now been upgraded to gigabit - thanks to a special offer that couldn't be turned down.

Before installing the new drive I had checked on the current inventory of drives installed in the machine which now runs Win2K3 - an odd mix due to the historic nature of ths particular beast thast started life as the primary LAN server here running good old NT (hah!). The error that was being reported for the faulty drive was "unable to read MFT". In my experience, the loss of the MFT (master file table) on an NTFS drive is more likely to be due to some form of software driven corruption than hardware so I left the old drive in the machine and, once the data was restored, told Windows to delete and recreate its partition. Bingo, the drive sprang into life without a problem and, diagnostics report no errors.

This leaves me with the worrying question of just how the data was lost while I was away and (in theory at least) the machine was inactive apart from servicing the occasional DHCP and DNS request for the network. A thorough check with anti-virus and anti-spyware software revealed no nasties present so it may just get written off as one of those questions that never gets answered.

I don't like those questions but I may just have to play wait-and-see with the machine to see if it happens again.

In the mean time, another example of how important it is to back up regularly. Without the backup, this would have proved - if not quite a disaster - a major upset and time taker. Later in the week, another example had me giving thanks to backups in even bigger style after a planned upgrade to the mail server caused a system fault that saw the complete machine become unusable.