I want to break free

Migration to Free Software. Uruguayan Navy

Mail Services case.

Enrique M. VerdesUYLUG

   

whoami

Senior specialist, Systems & IT Dpt. At CONATEL S.A.

Two migrations at CACSON Credit Union

Mail services migration project at Uruguay Navy.

ORT Uruguay University professor since 2002.

   

About what we will be talking

The case

Lets review the project and it's characteristics

The tips

How to have success in your migration project.

   

Who made this project succeed

Andrés Tarallo, my partner, provided specific experience working with mail services.

Cn. Gonzalo Montaña, Ltn. Gerardo Estellano & Alf. Benjamín Regueiro, from Navy N6 Dpt.

Postfix community.

   

The case

Because of obsolescense of hardware a new server was needed. That meant a migration

to a new version of MS Windows and Exchange server.

Budget constraints made this unviable, so this was the opportunity to move to free software.I'd want to point that the navy was already

using free software.

   

What should be migrated

SmartHostCGA

MiramarCerro

COMFLO

LocalClient

LocalClient Local

ClientLocalClient

Because of lack of reliability a multiserver configuration was used.

This was managed by Exchange transparently and we needed to emulate this.

   

Our solutionThe components we choose:

OpenLDAP for the users data backend.

Postfix as the SMTP server, for security, maturity and ease of management.

Cyrus for IMAP and POP access and user authentication using SASL.

Some homemade scripts to automate tasks.

   

The configuration

The key component of the Postfix configuration are:

The virtual lookup tables.

The transport table.

We used the vaddress attribute of the ldap open-xchange.schema to route mails to the apropiate server.

With the mailEnabled attribute set to no the mail was routed to the Exchange Server. By this we move the accounts little by little.

LDAP is replicated in each server running Postfix.

   

As dicas!!

From this and other

experiences I'd like to give

some tips and tools to help you who want to be

free.

   

What we learned: UAF

There are three factor to take into account in any migration project.

The Users (all of them).

The legacy Applications.

The data storage Format.

If you miss any one of them, you will have problems.

Software engineering background helps a lot!!

   

Software Engineering Life Cycle

Analisys

RequirementsCapture

Design

Implementation

Validation

Deployment &Maintenance

Retirement

   

How to handle UAF

Users make the 80% of the success.

You need commitment from the management. But not political decisions messing up.

Users ALLWAYS oppose changes by default.

Identify all users and how they use the system. If necesary write use-cases.

Carefull planning.

Big bang seldom works.

Store your data in standar formats.

Proprietary software don't like when people want to get out.

   

This may help you.

   

An example from our caseAn application to track fishing ships had trouble getting mail from the Cyrus-Imap server when the system was put in production. This was a BIG problem.

It's virtually impossible to extract user information from Exchange.

   

RememberPeople use computers to get things done, so,

software is for people, not people for software.

   

... and at the end...

any questions?

   

Tank you very muchMuito obrigado

http://www.elgallego.info

Fica de olho emFica de olho emhttp://www.pandorafms.orghttp://www.pandorafms.org

   

Copyright Enrique M. Verdes – 2008Esta obra está bajo una licencia Reconocimiento­No comercial­Compartir bajo la misma licencia 3.0 Unported de Creative Commons. Para ver una copia de esta licencia, visite http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by­nc­sa/3.0/ o envie una carta a Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California 94105, USA.