KDB Systems

Well the exper­i­ment to only run Linux while on a road trip was a par­tial fail­ure. I had to boot into Win­dows to get some work done that involved email and Exchange. I can’t seem to wean myself from Exchange. I thought I had Evo­lu­tion work­ing but it keeps lock­ing up on me. I’ve always had prob­lems with Evo­lu­tion but I had high hopes for the cur­rent ver­sion and Fedora 11. It works flaw­lessly while directly con­nected to my Exchange 2003 server. Work­ing remotely is another story alto­gether. It works spo­rad­i­cally. There will be long pauses of up to five min­utes where it seems to be locked up then sud­denly it’s work­ing fine for a few min­utes. Even­tu­ally it will lock up com­pletely. I switched to using OWA (Out­look Web Access) instead. The OWA expe­ri­ence with Fire­fox is not the best. OWA in Exchange 2003 really needs IE with ActiveX to be pro­duc­tive. I’ve tested Exchange 2007 and it has a much bet­ter OWA Expe­ri­ence with a non IE client. I’ll be updat­ing my Exchange server to 2007 in the near future. Hope­fully the com­bi­na­tion of OWA, Exchange 2007, and Fire­fox in Fedora 11 will be more productive.

My other prob­lem is my Black­berry. I haven’t found a way to sync the BB and Exchange in Linux. I could setup a Black­berry Enter­prise Server. This will sync Exchange and the BB over the cel­lu­lar car­rier in real time. It would cost me more money. I’d have to upgrade my wire­less plan from BIS to BES. I’d also be run­ning another server. Even vir­tu­al­ized it seems like overkill.

Other than the Exchange prob­lems the exper­i­ment has been a suc­cess. VPN and RDP access to the net­works I man­age hasn’t been a prob­lem. I’ve recieved some Excel attach­ments that Open Office had no prob­lems with. I received some .PDF files that weren’t a prob­lem. So far I have to say I pre­fer Win­dows 7 over Fedora 11 but it has noth­ing to do with the OS. It’s all about the appli­ca­tions and it seems as long as I’m mar­ried to Exchange I’ll be run­ning Windows.