http://www.osdir.com/Article9746.phtml

The South African Cabinet today announced that it had approved a free and open source strategy and that government would migrate its current software to free and open source software.

At a Cabinet media briefing government said that it had “approved a policy and strategy for the implementation of free and open source software (FOSS) in government.

If an entire government can embrace open source software then I’m guessing the average business probably can too?

How many governments need to adopt open source software before the business community takes note?

I had a discussion with a client recently about MS Exchange licensing. He had a quote from Microsoft and I almost dropped the phone when he told me how much a rollout for 200 people was going to cost him. Suffice to say, it was not dissimilar from what I make on an annual basis.

Stop the insanity.

I often hear the argument that its difficult to find IT people with open source experience. Speaking as an IT guy, we’re a pretty resourceful bunch. The whole IT gig is about being able to read manuals, search Google, and leverage forums, mailing lists, and social networks to solve problems.

If the business worlds starts demanding open source experience then the work force will respond.

What is BackupPC?

BackupPC is open source (free!) software that runs on Linux and BSD servers. Once properly configured, it will back up the data on any Windows, Mac, Linux, or Unix computers on your network using a combination of SSH, Rsync, Samba, and Tar. Administration and restores are made simple through an Apache based web interface. Setup and configuration is through a few simple text files. Best of all, installation on platforms like Ubuntu and Debian are made very simple as BackupPC (and all of its dependancies) is installed and configured automatically by a simple sptitude command. Continue reading →

BackupPC is an open source (free!), enterprise class, disk based, backup & recovery solution that can be used to backup all the Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and UNIX computers on your network.
Why backup to disk instead of tape?

• Disk is cheap. With the new 500GB SATA drives, its really easy to put together a backup server with 1+ TB of storage for very little money.
• Disk is fast. Backing up data to disk is much faster than backing up data to tape.
• No tapes to swap. Enough said. I hate swapping tapes.
• Reliability. What good is a backup if you can’t use it? If configured correctly, a Linux server with Disks in an appropriate RAID configuration is an extremely reliable way to store backups.
• Keep lots of file versions. Depending on the amount of free disk, its easy to keep lots of versions of your backups in an easy access spot. Want to login and restore a copy of that file from 6 months ago? 3 months? 2 weeks? No problem.

An example:

I have a client who has a few office PCs, a local Linux file server, a FreeBSD firewall server, and an offsite FreeBSD web/email server that is colocated 500 km away. We installed BackupPC on the Linux file server and it now backs up all the local PCs, the firewall, the Linux File Server, and the FreeBSD servers. BackupPC connects to the Windows computers using Samba (Rsync is an option) and backs up the FreeBSD servers using Rsync to save internet bandwidth. We’ve done several restores and the system has saved us on more than one occasion due to system crashes, viruses, etc.

Off-site Backup

Storing backups off-site is an integral part of any backup solution to guard against fire, flood, etc. Installing BackupPC on-site should really be regarded as a part of a larger backup strategy. BackupPC really comes into its own if you can install it in an off-site location and then have it backup your data over a VPN connection back to your office. This requires a decent internet connection, but it is a great way to ensure that your data is protected in case of hardware failure.

Repeat after me: “You don’t have to run Microsoft Exchange Server”.

Don’t get me wrong, MS Exchange is a great product IF YOU TAKE ADVANTAGE OF ITS ADVANCED FEATURES. However, it isn’t cheap to own or maintain and contains a lot of functionality that often isn’t used.

In fact, I believe that 70-80% of companies that are running MS Exchange could probably migrate to an internet standards based mail server running on Linux or FreeBSD without giving up much in the way of functionality that they actually use.

Not only would their email systems be far more stable and secure, but all the software is free! Not only is the software free, but its arguably the best email software on the planet.

I’ve recently setup corporate mail servers on both Ubuntu Linux and FreeBSD that incorporate Postfix, ClamAV (anti-virus), SpamAssassin (anti-spam), Dovecot (POP3 & IMAP), and Squirrelmail (webmail interface). These mail systems are secure, inexpensive, easy to administer, and can be used with MS Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, Evolution, and virtually any other mail client you can think of.

Give me a call if your company needs a new mail server!

From the OTRS Web Site (http://www.otrs.org):

OTRS is an Open source Ticket Request System (also well known as trouble ticket system) with many features to manage customer telephone calls and e-mails. The system is built to allow your support, sales, pre-sales, billing, internal IT, helpdesk, etc. department to react quickly to inbound inquiries. Do you receive many e-mails and want to answer them with a team of agents? You’re going to love the OTRS!

It is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and tested on Linux, Solaris, AIX, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Mac OS 10.x and Windows.

Sometimes the best helpdesk software also happens to be free. If your company is looking for a web-based system for dealing with web and email based support or sales enquires, then OTRS may be a great fit.