Alright, so I didn’t post the photos, I didn’t even take the camera. Crud! I’m trying to get back on the blogging band wagon, really I am.

Today, I have found a new love the open source software. Our MS Exchange server bombed out sometime around noon today and we have been without email for the past 4 hours. Word has come that they are on the horn with Microsoft, but they don’t really know what is wrong. The interesting thing about Open Source versus proprietary is the possibility of getting a temporary solution up and going rather quickly on limited resources.

Seeing how most open source is free, an IT department could take an old beige box that has just enough horsepower, some software (Samba, Sendmail, Courier’s imap server, Apache, Squirrelmail, Spamassassin, ClamAV, openLDAP with PostgreSQL database as a backend, Thunderbird) and any flavor of Linux OS and you can have a temporary solution up and running in as much time as it takes to install everything or plug the box in and power it up if you are disaster ready.

I’m not trying to speak poorly of our IT department, but the entire School of Business has ground to a halt waiting for their email to come back up. We shall see how long it takes