Initial setup: <4 hours
Initial testing: Variable, but ~16 hours should be more than enough
Monthly verification: < 1 hour
Monthly upgrade time: < 1 hour (Sendmail upgrades take seconds, major virus scanner updates involve downloading a file and copying it to the right directory, otherwise it updates automatically. SpamAssassin's the toughest, at around 10 minutes for an upgrade).
Downtime: 0
Patrick Morris wrote:
For what it's worth, here's a run-down of my time to set up and maintain a mail server with Sendmail, SpamAssassin, and Trend's Interscan Antivirus for ~500 users, with the caveat that I've been doing this stuff for a while -- if I was a Sendmail or Unix novice, we'd be looking at a lot more time.
Initial setup and test: ~40 hours. It should be noted that the installation I'm referring to here is very complex, and also includes Cyrus IMAP and LDAP authentication. It would probably be overkill for 40 or so users, and your configuration will probably be somewhat simpler. The process was documented step-by-step the first time it was done, and was recently redone on new servers in <8 hours.
Monthly verification that everything's working and up-to-date: <1 hour. A quick glance at the logs will tell me if anything's broken, and I do that daily anyway. I'm also on mailing lists for all important software I use, so I'm notified if there are updates to any of them.
Monthly upgrade time: <4 hours: ~1 hour if there's a SpamAssassin update, ~1 hour for Trend updates, ~1-2 hours for Sendmail updates. RBL updates do not apply; the checks are built in to SpamAssassin. Note that, on a typical month, most of these require no updates.
Downtime for work and testing: 0. That's what test servers are for: I have a staging machine I try everything on first before putting it in production, so there is no downtime on the production systems when a piece of software is updated. This is basic systems administration practice; I'd be very apprehensive if someone told me they *expected* 8 hours a month of downtime for something like this.
Stephen Bannasch wrote:
I have a question for the group. How much work is it to install and maintain a mailhost integrated with spam assassin for a company of about 40 employees. We have experience with sendmail and linux.
My IT guy gives the following estimate. He's comparing this with the administrative cost for installing and running PureMessage.
-- Time estimates for an open source solution:
-- 60+ hours to setup and test sendmail/anti-virus/RBL/anti-spam
software from source.
-- 8 hours every month to verify that things are working and up to date
-- 8 hours every month to upgrade software (sendmail/RBL/virus/spam, all
different)
-- 8 hours of down time every month while working and testing
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