[Kolab-devel] Kontact reliability - revisited

[Bernhard Reiter]

On Thursday 02 August 2007 18:33, ITSEF Admin wrote:
> My apologies for the long "silence" - the joys of being a part-time admin:
> "real" work took over... :-} In any case thank you kindly for your
> response!

No problem, I had slight hopes that the problems did evaporate in the 
meantime. ;)

> On Wednesday 18 July 2007 11:14, Bernhard Reiter wrote:

> > > We have some 35 users, all using Kontact proko2 (by now 2.1.7) on SuSE
> > > 10.0.
> >
> > For others: It is important to know that KK offers full professional
> > support for Kontact on a set of systems. This largely depends on if we
> > have enough business to fund tighter quality control, packaging and
> > the occasional large effort for the really hard problems that are
> > sometimes related to other libraries on the platform.
> > Most stable currently is Debian Sarge/Proko2 branch.
> > Debian Etch/Enterprise Branch is quite close behind this
> > and will be the next platform.
>
> Hm. Any opinion on (K)ubuntu?

At the moment we do not have the professional support for (K)ubuntu in
place. This always depends on if we have enough customers to be able
to finance maintenance of a branch. 
We are experimenting with Ubuntu packages though and are also
in contact with the http://www.impi.org.za/ people.

> Ok... We're currently looking into moving to another distro anyway (support
> for SuSE 10.0 runs out in October) and we're not too attached to SuSE, so
> looking at something else is an option. The guys we have most of our IT
> support outsourced to seem to favour Kubuntu, hence my question above...
> :-)

Well we hope that Suse will pick up the KDE enterprise branch as well,
this would make it easier for us to support this setting.
(We only started offering packages because we could not get a close
cooperation with distributions going.)
You could ask for both: a) that they pick up enterprise branch
b) If they have a 3rd level contract with the Kolab-Konsortium to make
sure the Kolab functions and email-crypto are well supported.

> > > - In several cases, events were created but they somehow vanished from
> > > the server
> >
> > You need to find out if they have been on the server in the first place.
> > Things to try:
> > * Check the imapd logs, you should be able to follow created and deleted
> >   emails in there.
> > * do lists of the files more often for the users in question.
>
> Right. I have on my ToDo to add an additional hourly backup of all
> groupware folders (should be Contacts, Calendar and Tasks as the most
> important ones (haven't heard much about people using Notes and Journal))
> for at least a couple of days back. If I exclude the actual mail folders,
> this should be doable in an incremental manner without requiring excessive
> amounts of HD space. I reckon this will happen within the next two weeks.

You could even do faster savings of the file lists to see what is going on.

> > > - I had two cases where the agenda was emptied completely. As far as I
> > > understand the whole system, this should only happen if for some reason
> > > the local DIMAP cache is removed, right? In that case, I *might* tend
> > > to put it down to [0].
> >
> > Also find out how many users have write access to the folder in question.
> > Are you talking about single user folders?
>
> In all cases that I have actually heard of: Yes. There aren't many shared
> groupware folders in use around here.

In using the KDE Kolab clients for many years, this only happened once to me
and I did lose some objects (which I got back from the backup), the imap logs 
had been quite helpful for this. A client in a very bad broken situation
will always able to do this just from the algorithmic point of view.

> To that extent, I agreed with $BOSS to come up with a short user enquete,
> so we finally get more reliable data (besides the few reports we actullally
> *did* get). All these rumours are pure poison when it comes to trust (throw
> some general "but it worked under Windows" into the mix and you get the
> idea...).

We know the problem of rumors and the best way actually is to keep 
communication open. Disclose the problems that you have, but also state
the ones that you do not have. One customer of ours has this rumor going,
invested each case with a lot of effort and could not prove one single loss.

> Well, what I'm currently planning is to prepare a test machine with Kubuntu
> 7.04 (KDE 3.5.6 or even 3.5.7) and the proko2 client - and then give it to
> our user with the worst problems. If that machine works for that user, I'd
> be cautiously optimistic that we're out of the fire... ...unless you have
> some strong recommendations against Kubuntu. 

No strong recommendation against Kubuntu.

> Talking about which: Would you recommend using the Debian binary of the
> proko2 client or rather build from source?

Go for enterprise branch, apt.intevation..de has some experimental packages
for feisty, they might provide a start. Unless you have packages which are 
precisly for your version, build from source.

Bernhard

-- 
Managing Director - Owner: www.intevation.net       (Free Software Company)
Germany Coordinator: fsfeurope.org. Coordinator: www.Kolab-Konsortium.com.
Intevation GmbH, Osnabrück, DE; Amtsgericht Osnabrück, HRB 18998
Geschäftsführer Frank Koormann, Bernhard Reiter, Dr. Jan-Oliver Wagner
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