This post is about my experiences and thoughts relating to installing and running sun comms suite on OpenSolaris, and it’s suitability as an email platform in general.
INSTALLATION
The following components installed happily on OpenSolaris with minimal tweaking (mostly the creation of symlinks to NSS and TLS libs).
- Sun Directory Server Enterprise Edition.
- Sun Messaging Server
- Sun Calendar Server
These components I probably could have gotten to run but it was such a battle dealing with the Identity suite that I opted to just load the App Server and all the components that required it on a RedHat system (yeah I know yuck right?).
- Sun Java Application Server Enterprise Edition
- Sun Identity Suite – Access Manager
- Delegated Administrator
- Convergence
- Sun Instant Messaging Server
It looks like the developers are eliminating the requirement to have access manager installed for the version 7 release.
Overall I am pleased with the platform, some notes:
Messaging Server
I love it. It is very fast, and has all the features I have ever wanted and more. I don’t particularly care for the configuration file syntax but it is tolerable and to be truthful the default install is so decent that you really don’t have to do too much outside of say UBE and virus filtering/policy. I like the way channels and the dispatcher work. I like being able to create seperate process pools for various channels.
Convergence
Is really awesome, there are some small ui issues but it is easily the best webmail/webcal client out there. If it had message threading it would be perfect.
Indentity Suite Access Manager
This thing is a beast. Easily the most difficult component to get working. I am really not sure how I feel about SSO for my type of deployment yet. I think given the option I would rather not deal with this component, and would rather just see it eliminated and setup ldap query caching or something.
Delegated Administrator
I am satisfied with the command line environment. IM provisioning is about halfway finished. The web interface is decent but not great. Over all it is not as customizeable as I would like. There is also very little documentation about writing plugins or modifying the JSP and XML templates to facilitate more advanced needs. I really wish that the commcli servlet interface was documented. I have never worked with servlets in Java before, and I have only written a couple small apps in the language, so perhaps I am missing something here. I suppose I could load the servlet class files up in an IDE and see if I can extract the method names and parameters. It would be nice if I could build my own flex based interface and just not use the web based DA.
Application Server
This is an irritation for me, there is a bug that causes the admin user to stay logged in for some reason. Going through sun’s site there is an update to go from 9.1 to the new glass fish EE server. Guess what the Solaris version of the patch is non pay, the redhat version is pay. I guess I don’t understand this. Is this standard practice with sun and their products that run on 3rd party OS’s? Had I known this I would have just dealt with the pain of a standard Solaris install.
SSL
SSL was a major PAIN IN THE ASS to get working on all services. I understand that all the components are setup to be distributed accross multiple systems (my deployment uses 6) but having seperate key stores for each component, and much worse different keystore formats, is a pain to deal with. JKS just plain sux. I had to use a 3rd party tool to import a key that was not generated in the current key store because the standard tool set doesn’t import keys into JKS, only certs.
Future Plans
I like where sun is going with the comms platform. Reworking the calendar server, implementing caldav and carddav is HUGE.
My Future Plans With Comms
I really want my mail platform to be as open and self supportive as possible. This is only acheivable with fully open components. I also want the entire thing running on OpenSolaris with as many of the stock packages as possible. After version 7 comes out I want to eliminate the access manager from my deployment, and provision directly from the LDAP system. I will then attempt to switch from the Java System LDAP server to OpenDS. This actually doesn’t look to be that difficult. With that finished I would like to switch to the OpenSolaris packaged version of GlassFish if possible. As far as Delegated administrator I would like to replace the web interface with a flex based web app and either directly provision in the LDAP directory or interface with the commcli server.
I would really like it if native OpenSolaris packages could be provided for comms, but if they never are I think I can engineer a satisfactory solution on my own and still take advantage of the toolset.
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