Re: Qmail support in Australia ?
Mark Delany writes: If you don't need it to be onsite support, then does it matter where the support comes from? Time zones. I have a customer in India. If I stay up late enough, the very end of my waking hours overlaps with their business day. Plus, if you're needed on site, being on the same continent is a help. It's a twenty-hour trip to India for me. Plus there's jet lag. I did some qmail training the first day I got there, after two missed flights and a four hour layover in Dubai. About three or four times I woke myself up with the sound of my own voice. Very strange to wake up talking, and to realize that you have NO IDEA what you should say next. :) -- -russ nelson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://russnelson.com | If I knew the Crynwr sells support for free software | PGPok | destination of the 521 Pleasant Valley Rd. | +1 315 268 1925 voice | handbasket, I never would Potsdam, NY 13676-3213 | +1 315 268 9201 FAX | have gotten into it!
Re: Qmail support in Australia ?
On Tue, 19 Dec 2000, Russell Nelson wrote: Mark Delany writes: If you don't need it to be onsite support, then does it matter where the support comes from? Time zones. I have a customer in India. If I stay up late enough, the very end of my waking hours overlaps with their business day. Plus, if you're needed on site, being on the same continent is a help. It's a twenty-hour trip to India for me. It's 24 hours from Sydney to Ottawa :) And then there is the 15 or 16 hours timezone difference. Plus there's jet lag. I did some qmail training the first day I got there, after two missed flights and a four hour layover in Dubai. About three or four times I woke myself up with the sound of my own voice. Very strange to wake up talking, and to realize that you have NO IDEA what you should say next. :) You have to be asleep to do that? I do that when I'm wide awake! :) -- Regards Peter -- Peter Samuel[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.e-smith.org (development)http://www.e-smith.com (corporate) Phone: +1 613 368 4398 Fax: +1 613 564 7739 e-smith, inc. 1500-150 Metcalfe St, Ottawa, ON K2P 1P1 Canada "If you kill all your unhappy customers, you'll only have happy ones left"
Re: Qmail support in Australia ?
On Mon, 18 Dec 2000, listmon wrote: try [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] peter samuels is the person to speak to. Missed us by 4 months. Both Gordon Rowell (gormand) and myself have moved to Canada to work for e-smith. Let us put word out on the grapevine at home in Oz to see if we can find anyone available. Else for hands off mail server, look to e-smith ( uses qmail as mail server ) we have a number of clients running 4.0 now www.e-smith.com So do we :) Thanks for the plug. Regards Stewart Evans Macclinic Adelaide - Original Message - From: Dennis [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, December 16, 2000 10:20 AM Subject: Qmail support in Australia ? Hi all... I'm in the process of proposing a shift off our current (almost working :)) email system to qmail and have stumbled upon a small but significant problem. Our IT manager is a non-techi and as such is always looking for the, MS solution... I'm the only *nix guy in the department and have successfully convinced him to move DNS/WEB/Cache/DHCP over to *nix, phew !!! (email is next) The IT manager likes throwing "What happens if you get hit by a bus" at me... well, I get hit by a bus and not a single soul in our IT department can do any Qmail admin. I'd be happy to train them up but I need to also know that commercial support is available in Australia... This is the clincher !!! Cheers Dennis -- Regards Peter -- Peter Samuel[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.e-smith.org (development)http://www.e-smith.com (corporate) Phone: +1 613 368 4398 Fax: +1 613 564 7739 e-smith, inc. 1500-150 Metcalfe St, Ottawa, ON K2P 1P1 Canada "If you kill all your unhappy customers, you'll only have happy ones left"
Re: Qmail support in Australia ?
try [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] peter samuels is the person to speak to. Else for hands off mail server, look to e-smith ( uses qmail as mail server ) we have a number of clients running 4.0 now www.e-smith.com Regards Stewart Evans Macclinic Adelaide - Original Message - From: Dennis [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, December 16, 2000 10:20 AM Subject: Qmail support in Australia ? Hi all... I'm in the process of proposing a shift off our current (almost working :)) email system to qmail and have stumbled upon a small but significant problem. Our IT manager is a non-techi and as such is always looking for the, MS solution... I'm the only *nix guy in the department and have successfully convinced him to move DNS/WEB/Cache/DHCP over to *nix, phew !!! (email is next) The IT manager likes throwing "What happens if you get hit by a bus" at me... well, I get hit by a bus and not a single soul in our IT department can do any Qmail admin. I'd be happy to train them up but I need to also know that commercial support is available in Australia... This is the clincher !!! Cheers Dennis
Re: Qmail support in Australia ?
Dennis writes: Our IT manager is a non-techi and as such is always looking for the, MS solution... I'm the only *nix guy in the department and have successfully convinced him to move DNS/WEB/Cache/DHCP over to *nix, phew !!! (email is next) The IT manager likes throwing "What happens if you get hit by a bus" at me... well, I get hit by a bus and not a single soul in our IT department can do any Qmail admin. Dennis, It sounds like we're in very similar situations. I began working at a new company approximately 4 months ago and I too am moving most of the core services off Windows. I was presented with the same question regarding the bus, and even variations with street-cars, airplanes and trucks. ;) Cross-training, documentation and the URL to the archives are all a great start. We are about to rollout djbdns services from W2K machines and I had my two techs write the whole dns data file out for a couple hundred domains -- I don't think I'll need to explain to them how the entries work again. :) Yesterday I created another qmail server that will act as our relay and serve a hundred or so users -- I expect to go through some similar knowledge transfers. In the end, I think the benefits far outweigh the risks, and as Sean mentioned, M$ solutions have their learning curves as well. Worst case scenario would involve remote support via a SSH terminal from one of the many friendly qmail experts out there. ../mk - qmail grasshopper [BTW - the BSD box I created yesterday has djbdnscache, ssh2 and qmail w. courier-imap, vpopmail running on a dual PIII-500 with 256MB -- the machine has 232MB free with all services running (though no traffic yet) - what a beautiful thing!]
Re: Qmail support in Australia ?
On Sat, Dec 16, 2000 at 10:50:00AM +1100, Dennis wrote: The IT manager likes throwing "What happens if you get hit by a bus" at I'd answer that question with "Another tech follows my documentation". If you document the common tasks you're doing for day-to-day maintenance and operations, it's really not a problem... QMail runs very well at a lot of places that don't have QMail experts working there... If you get hit by a bus *AND* a QMail emergency comes up, you can either refer them to, or have in place an agreement with one or more of the consultants listed on www.qmail.org (shameless plug ;-). On the one hand, the question of relying on something you can't support is legitimate. On the other hand, I think it's often used as an excuse. Just because the software you select runs under MS doesn't mean that one of the existing techs can just pick it up and deal with it, without a similar learning curve to doing the same sort of thing for QMail. That, of course, depends on the level of automation, documentation, and their willingness to work with something new. As an example, a few years ago we were called in to manage a group of machines in an emergency. The Unix systems posed basicly the same amount of problem as the Windows machines (except that the Unix machines never crashed on us ;-). The Unix machines were running Roxen where I only had experience with Apache, so it was a learning experience all the way around. In this case, we effectively had no access to their existing techs, and there was no documentation other than passwords. Sean -- "The big bad wolf, he learned the rule. You gotta get hot to play real cool." Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous [EMAIL PROTECTED] tummy.com - Linux Consulting since 1995. Qmail, KRUD, Firewalls, Python
RE: Qmail support in Australia ?
Hi Mark... As I mentioned... If I get hit by a bus the other guys no NOTHING of unix, NOTHING The picture is starting to become clearer now huh :) -Original Message- From: Mark Delany [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Saturday, 16 December 2000 11:10 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Qmail support in Australia ? If you don't need it to be onsite support, then does it matter where the support comes from? I'm sure a number of the support orgs on www.qmail.org are happy to offer remote support contracts. Regards. On Sat, Dec 16, 2000 at 10:50:00AM +1100, Dennis wrote: Hi all... I'm in the process of proposing a shift off our current (almost working :)) email system to qmail and have stumbled upon a small but significant problem. Our IT manager is a non-techi and as such is always looking for the, MS solution... I'm the only *nix guy in the department and have successfully convinced him to move DNS/WEB/Cache/DHCP over to *nix, phew !!! (email is next) The IT manager likes throwing "What happens if you get hit by a bus" at me... well, I get hit by a bus and not a single soul in our IT department can do any Qmail admin. I'd be happy to train them up but I need to also know that commercial support is available in Australia... This is the clincher !!! Cheers Dennis
