Letters

First off, I really did enjoy reading the article on replacing Microsoft Exchange with Linux [“Understanding and Replacing Microsoft Exchange” by Tom Adelstein, LJ, February 2003]. The article didn't explicitly state you were trying to replace Microsoft Exchange 5.5, but it was obvious to me that was the version you were working with. Microsoft's Exchange 5.5 was limited in the total size of the database, but that has changed in Exchange 2000 and Titanium. Exchange 2000's Exchange Storage Engine has been rewritten to allow much larger database sizes, which would be limited only to the total capacity of the hardware on which the database would reside. Also, I fail to understand the reasoning of why IMAP was provided as a connection mechanism. IMAP will provide you with a way to preview the e-mail message. Does your DLL plugin to Outlook provide a way for the message to remain on the e-mail server?

—Chris Lynch, Network Engineer

Tom Adelstein's reply: Thanks for your thoughtful letter. I appreciate your detailed understanding of Exchange. It is quite impressive. Our goal at Bynari was to create an RFC-compliant platform that allowed Microsoft Outlook to run in corporate workgroup mode. In the case of Outlook 2002, we wanted to provide calendar sharing and delegation.

I have been a happy LJ subscriber for many years now. I am usually not one to complain about things but the articles written by Marcel Gagné are getting irritating. His French Chef schtick is getting VERY old and detracts from his articles. Please consider having him stop that and simply write informative articles.

—David Vohwinkel

It is with much interest that I have read your editorial on clustering the previously unclustered [From the Editor by Don Marti, LJ, February 2003]. I seem to be unable to convince the powers that be at some CAD and CAD/CAM firms that this is an option. Therefore, I would very much like to get information on how to make programs that are not enabled for cluster technologies to work with cluster hardware configurations.

—Darald

If you have one huge, slow process, you'll probably need to rewrite the software using a clustering library. However, if you need to make many processes cooperate, OpenMosix automatically will migrate some of them to idle nodes in the cluster. See openmosix.sf.net.

—Editor

Thank you for excellent article on screen(1) [“Power Sessions with Screen” by Adam Lazur, LJ, January 2003]. Please persuade Adam Lazur to write a couple follow-up articles to this introductory one. I'm already starving for more.

—Jari

In the March 2003 issue, there was an article on weblogs that led readers to believe that Geeklog is a fork of PHP-Nuke [“Building with Blogs” by Doc Searls and Dave Sifry]. Much respect needs to be given to PHP-Nuke for helping to spur the weblog phenomenon, and I think the article presented that respect. However, Geeklog is not a fork of PHP-Nuke. Also, the article should have mentioned www.opensourcecms.com. It has the most popular packages in a demo-able state for users to test them without having to download, install and configure.

—Tony Bibbs

Seth Schoen's column “Broadcast Flag: MPAA's Latest Attack on Linux” (LJ, March 2003) appears to be mistitled. Mr. Schoen did not provide evidence on the MPAA making any form of attack on Linux or on any free operating system in the article. On a side note, he wrote, “Reporters were barred from meetings, which had a $100-per-meeting admission fee.” Were reporters specifically barred or was it just that reporters would have to pay $100 per meeting?

—Jason

Seth Schoen replies: Magazine editors have little space available for titles, so I could see where they would feel the need to condense “Broadcast Flag: MPAA's Latest Attack on the Right to Use Free Software to Lawfully Make and Interoperate with Recordings of Copyrighted Audiovisual Works” (which is what I would have called it) to “Broadcast Flag: MPAA's Latest Attack on Linux”. Reporters were specifically barred from meetings; they tried to participate, and they were kicked out.