Time to dust off those UNIX skills …

You may recall that in the time BTM (Before The Move) I had started looking and planning to replace Exchange Server/Outlook as my principal email programs. Work on this was underway (though temporarily stalled) when the Trojan struck.

Quick recap: The garage houses four servers;

• two were running Windows 2003: the PDC for the domain (login services and central storage for the PCs round the house) and the mail server
• one was running Linux (Centos) as the host for the Asterisk PBX (VOIP phone system)
• the fourth is an old tower PC now crammed with large hard drives and running a stripped down Linux providing a backup store for the rest of the network of machines via NAS

The Trojan attack – and especially the cost to me in time and effort – was the nail in the coffin for Windows 2003. Though both machines were up to date with patches and protected by several layers of protection they still got hit and the fact is that Microsoft’s operating systems (especially the server versions) are too attractive to “the bad guys”.

Though it’s been a few years since I last used Linux in any serious way, I had been reading that the various new versions and distros had come a very long way in terms of usability and (relevant here) ease of management. So, after doing a lot of reading and research on the web I took the plunge and bought a copy of Xandros Server – a commercial Linux variant that includes a small-business copy of the Scalix email server that claims to offer full Exchange compatibility.