Factotum: Documentation Handyman

Lemonade refers to an IETF working group formed to address the requirements of supporting standards-based email in a mobile or other resource-constrained environment. A "resource-constrained" environment is one where any or all of the following might be encountered:

• Low bandwidth, high latency networks
• Intermittent network connectivity
• Scarce power and compute cycles
• Minimizing data usage is a goal

The Lemonade Profile (RFC 5550, http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5550) defines a set of IMAP and SMTP extensions that address these constraints. Sun Java System Messaging Server implements the extensions defined in RFC 5550.

For more information on how Messaging Server supports Lemonade, see Messaging Server Lemonade Profile 1 Support.

Ah, the good ol' days. (BTW, gas price was under $1.50/gallon back then, at least in CA.)

Hat tip Doug G.

New Messaging Server tech article on BigAdmin. Synopsis:

Sun Java System Messaging Server provides logging facilities for the Messaging Server MTA, the Message Store, and services. The logging facilities provide you with time-stamped and labeled information about your system's messaging services. Using log files, you can gather message statistics, perform trend determination, troubleshoot problems, and so forth.

While the system performs automatic rollovers to maintain the current log file, you must determine and manage log file rotation aspects such as how large a single log file may be, how large cumulative log files may be, how many log files to retain, and so forth.

This article focuses on configuring log file rotation for the Messaging Server service logs, such as the IMAP service.

It's official! Messaging Server 6.3 now supports the ZFS file system, with the following caveats:

• You must patch Messaging Server 6.3 to 6.3p3 (6.3-4.01)). This patch has been released to SunSolve and should show up the week of September 10. See below for patch IDs.
• You must be running a minimum of Solaris OS 10 U3 for Messaging Server 6.3 to support ZFS.
• ZFS support does not apply to Linux platforms.

Other requirements:

• Do not perform a ZFS snapshot when the message store database snapshot is running. Schedule ZFS snapshot to run 30 minutes after a message store database snapshot is run. This will allow the database snapshot to complete before the ZFS snapshot. Message store database snapshot frequency is controlled by local.snapshot.interval.
• Before restoring a ZFS snapshot make sure all Messaging Server processes are stopped.

Patch Information

More Details

If you want to backup your Message Store for disaster recovery, you can use a file system snapshot tool such as ZFS snapshot to capture a snapshot of the file system. The file system snapshot must be an atomic point-in-time snapshot (as is the case of ZFS), otherwise, the backup can have inconsistent data.

It is best to capture all message store data (message store partitions and database files) with the same file system snapshot instance. However, if this cannot be done, then capture the data in separate file system snapshots at the same time. And if this can't be done, capture the message store data in separate file system snapshots in the following order:

1. Message store database snapshots. Note that database snapshots (configured with local.store.snapshotpath) are different from file system snapshots.
2. Database files (data-root/store/mboxlist)
3. Message store partition paths (store.partition.*.path)
4. Message store partition message paths (store.partition.*.messagepath)
5. Configuration data (data-root/config)

If the partitions and the database files are not backed up with the same point-in-time snapshot, run reconstruct -m after restoring the file system snapshots. This will synchronize the database and store partitions. Again, it is best to capture all message store data with the same file system snapshot instance to avoid doing a reconstruct.

If the message store database snapshot (db snapshot) is running when the file system snapshot is taken, the file system snapshot can contain an incomplete db snapshot. Although an incomplete db snapshot is harmless, it is best to schedule the file system snapshot to run 30 minutes after the db snapshot. This will ensure that a complete db snapshot is included in the file system snapshot.

Not sure what these stats mean exactly (reading tea leaves, anyone?), but here are the recent top hits on the MsgServerDoc wiki (excluding the main page, which was number one):

1. Sending Mail Newly Created Internet Domains‎ [146]
2. Spam best practices‎ [104]
3. LDAP Failover [102]
4. Messaging Server Versus Gmail‎ [98]
5. Push Email Support‎ [94]
6. What Browsers‎ [93]
7. Customize Subject Mailing List‎ [89]
8. Sender Rewriting Scheme (SRS)‎ [81]
9. SPARC T1 Technology and Messaging Server Architecture [79]

It's bacn.

BTW, if you're looking for a great Messaging Server list of anti-spam techniques, get it here. And another article of interest on preventing Denial of Service attacks in Messaging Server.

Reminder: The following Messaging Server 6.3 patch (MS 6.3p3 (6.3-3.01)) is now available on Sunsolve:

The experts tell me that, among other things, this patch fixes the quota warning problem noted in BugID 6574627, and also provides VCS support.

I recently worked with a couple of our Messaging Server gurus to come up with an indepth article titled "Troubleshooting the Message Transfer Agent for Sun Java System Messaging Server."

Synopsis: This article describes how to troubleshoot the Message Transfer Agent (MTA) for Sun Java System Messaging Server, specifically message buildup in channels, including the TCP channels (tcp_local and tcp_intranet) and the ims-ms channel. This article treats troubleshooting as a process of learning about the MTA so that you can identify signs of problems and can then respond with possible solutions.

Get the article.

Inbox Zero. This guy's on to something big, er, small, er, zero. Been giving it a try since 7/25, and by George, it works. Watch the vid, feel the power.

Yes, Comms Suite runs on more than Solaris, remember that other OS--Linux? Thanks to Shane H., we now have an 'offical' quick start guide for installing the Comms Suite 5 stack on Linux.

Get the doc here:

• PDF
• HTML

Q. I need to set up SSO for Communications Express. What has changed between Messaging Server 6 2005Q4 (Java ES 4) and Messaging Server/Communications Express 6.3 (Comms Suite 5)?

A. Jhawk writes:

In the prior releases, we needed SSO to maintain authenticated sessions
between two of our HTTP servers. The two HTTP servers are the web
container (web server/app server) for the UWC servlets and the WebMail
server (mshttpd). Going into our Comms Suite 5 (UWC 6.3), we moved the
WebMail server behind the web container.

prior to 6.3
|------- web container(uwc)
web browser ----| (sso between)
|-------webmail server (mshttpd)

in 6.3
web browser----web container(uwc) --- webmail server(mshttpd)

Now in 6.3, we do not require SSO to maintain authenticated sessions
between our internal services. However, we do still support SSO to
co-exist authentication with 3rd Party web applications such as Portal
Server.

Back on June 12, I advertised a revised edition of the Sun Java System Messaging Server 6.3 Administration Guide. One customer asked for a diff doc to detail what was new or had changed in the updated version. Today I'm happy to announce that, due to some hard work on the part of the Administration Guide writer, we do have such a doc--actually, part of the guide itself, in the form of a revision changes section, which you can view here.

I don't know if we can pull this off every revision, as the process is somewhat involved, but we were listening and so responded to what one customer asked for.

I've been trying to get an answer on whether the lastest version of Messaging Server, 6.3, supports ZFS yet. Unfortunately, it looks like the answer is to hang on for the next release.

In the meantime, for more information, I found this thread on the Messaging Server software forum to be about as informative as anything else we've said publically on the matter.