Well I thought I would discuss my new project I have been doing at home to "improve" my i730 a bit. I have setup numerous Exchange servers at many different companies, and have setup well over 30 "smart" devices for push. I have even used my device while connected to some of their Exchange systems and enjoyed the push technology. Now I wanted it at home...
Just a little disclaimer. What I am doing here isn't for newbs, or the casual person to attempt, although it could be possible. Currently I am not going in to detail as to each step, or providing a guide (yet...) to set this up. Without some knowledge, it is possible when setting up your server to leave it wide open for attacks, as an open Relay for mail would could cause Spammers to attack it and abuse your connection, etc. So until steps are FULLY lined out, you might want to just consider this a dream or desire... Also cost could be an issue for MOST people, as this project cost me around $400 in software alone, not including what I already had.
I have used everything from Exchange 5.5 -> Exchange 2003 Enterprise (and played with Exchange 2007 beta). I went through my "spare parts" bin and scrounged up enough parts for a decent computer to act as a server. It's an AMD 1900+ with 1.5 GB of RAM and two hard drives (120 GB and 250 GB). It runs fairly well, and of course with a server, you don't need much in terms of video or sound, so I just pulled the oldest video card I had in my bin, and didn't even worry about sound.
Now that I had a machine built and ready to go, I needed to put an OS on it. Exchange will run on an XP based machine, but I wanted an Active Directory network, and the security of Windows 2003 Server, so a looking for a license for it I went. I didn't have any spare licenses for it laying around (go figure, who does), so a searching online I went for an OEM copy, or something similar.
In all the looking, for both Exchange and Windows 2003 Server, I think the best solution, cost and setup wise, is Windows 2003 Small Business Server, which includes a copy of Exchange already built in to Windows 2003, as well as some additional resources that can be useful for a "small business". So I narrowed it down to Windows 2003 SBS as the OS and copy of Exchange I wanted to run.
Now the problem comes in, cost. Windows 2003 Small Business Server is around $365-599 for an OEM license (5 users). Still pretty expensive for just push e-mail. Since this would be my home production server, and I am one of those people who keep things as legit as possible, with licenses for all of my software, I was going to have to spend some money. I looked in to Exchange 2003 and it's still around the same cost, and of course Windows 2003 Server isn't cheap either. So I continued to hunt and came across a great program from Microsoft called "Microsoft Action Pack". This is part of their partner program, and considering I am already a Microsoft Partner (a free program to help you learn how to "sell" Microsoft products), I decided the $299 price for 10 licenses for just about every Microsoft Server/client product was well worth it. In the Microsoft Action Pack is a copy of Windows 2003 Server, Exchange 2003 Server, and even Windows 2003 Small Business Server, as well as MANY more products. Each includes a 10 license copy of each product, so up to 10 users can use it. It's not for resale or distribution, and I am not going to go in to the details of the rest of their usage requirements, which you can read on their website:
https://partner.microsoft.com/40016455
Now I meet the requirements to use the Action Pack (and you may not), but it fits right in to my business model, and will actually improve some aspects of what I do, helping keep some of my costs down. Most of all, this is what Microsoft has to say about it:
Quote:
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The software included with your subscription can be used only for internal business use, testing, evaluation, demonstration, training, and educational purposes.
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So since I will be using the software to demonstration, and improve my business with training and testing, this fits in it's role perfectly. If you don't meet eligibility requirements to use the software, then you should look in to OEM software, or potentially purchasing a computer from Dell (or another manufacturer) with the OS pre-installed. I contimplated just paying around $1000 for a server with Windows 2003 SBS pre-installed, since that is about the going rate for an "inexpensive" server, but once I found the action pack, and knew I had a machine capable of running Windows 2003 SBS, I stuck with my idea of doing it myself.
Now with that being said, I signed up and received my Welcome Kit, including my copy of Windows 2003 SBS, which I decided on for a few reasons I will discuss later on. First of course, I put my machine together, booted from the CD and loaded the Windows 2003 OS on the computer, and finishing the install by choosing to install IIS and Exchange. This was Windows 2003 SBS SP1, so I loaded SP2 on the server (which was released somewhat recently). Once updated, I also loaded Exchange SP2 for SBS and finished setting up my 2003 server, and Exchange.
Now this is where the cool part comes in. I didn't want to deliver mail directly to my server, since I am running this on a consumer ISP line, and I don't want to increase my rates of my internet connection, so I needed to determine a way to do it without have a static IP, and without changing to much around. Also I didn't want to use DNS to route my mail, since some Mail Servers will reject e-mail from a dynamic ip, and return the message. So I needed a way to use my ISPs outgoing mail server. SBS server can meet both of my needs because of the POP connector built in to SBS and the SmallBusiness SMTP connector, which allows you to use an external SMTP server to send your mail.
So I set it up, tell Exchange that my e-mail address was my "normal" e-mail, and then setting up the server to check my POP mail. The only drawback to doing this is you only get your mail every time the server POPs the connection. And with Exchange's POP3 Connector, it does it every 15 minutes at the lowest end. There is a registry hack that you can do:
Quote:
1) Set the polling interval to 15 minutes in the POP3 Connector
2) Locate and then click the following registry subkey:
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SmallBusinessServer\Network\POP3
Connector"
3. On the "Edit" menu, point to "New", and then click "DWORD Value".
4. Type "ScheduleAccelerator" (without the quotation marks; no space between
words) as the entry
name, and then press ENTER.
5. On the "Edit" menu, click "Modify".
To determine the polling interval, the value that is configured on the
"Scheduling" tab in the GUI (i.e. 15 minutes) is divided by the value that
you type for the ScheduleAccelerator entry. For example, if a 15 minute
interval is specified in the GUI and you set the value of the
ScheduleAccelerator entry to 3, the connector will poll every 5 minutes. Set
the value to 2 and it will poll every 7.5 minutes. Set the value to 5 and it
will poll every 3 minutes. I've never gone higher then 3. No one's
complained that every 5 minutes is too slow. If they did, I'd move them to
SMTP.
6. In the "Value data" box, type the value that you want, and then click
"OK." No need to reboot. Just stop and restart the POP3 Connector service.
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I set it up to be 5, which polls every 3 minutes then, which seems to be fast enough, quicker than POPing on my phone, or with Outlook being set to every 5 minutes. There are also TONS of third party POP connectors available that allow MANY more options, but since I am delivering mail to one box, from one POP account, it works for my needs very well, and doesn't cost me the extra money that the third party software does.
I setup my ISPs outgoing mail server in my SmallBusiness SMTP Connector, and it works for pushing out my mail, without having to use DNS to do it, keeping messages from returning because it thinks that my server is invalid.
Now the next thing I had to do was open the correct ports on my router. Since you are POPing/pulling your mail, and pushing your mail through your providers SMTP server, you don't need to open ports 110 and 25. This helps protect you. Now I was doing this for another reason, I wanted access to ALL of my e-mail from the web. Not just what was in my mailserver's box since the last time I POP'd from Outlook, but I wanted access to the thousands of e-mails I have in my Outlook folder from back to 1995 (the earliest "saved" e-mail I have).
So I opened the ports on my router for 80 and 443 and forwarded them to the Exchange box. This allows me to access Outlook Web Access, which gives me FULL access to my mail, all subfolder, contacts, calendar, tasks, notes, etc. It's a WONDERFUL thing.
Now that all of this is working, my next process was to get push syncing working. Since I am on a Dynamic IP address, I decided to setup Dynamic DNS, which my router can handle on it's level. This gives me the ability to register a domain name and it will change depending on what my IP address is. So I registered my address with the service my router works with, and plugged in my information in to my router. Then my address was registered with a domain name (a cost of $20/year).
I then setup my own certificate so I could have SSL traffic, and got my device setup to sync, and then setup my schedule. Everything synced when new mail arrived, and when I made changes to my device.
Now since I still get a TON of SPAM, I decided to get the spam filter going on the server side, so I don't get the SPAM on my phone. It's working well, but I might end up purchasing a server side spam software that would be a bit better than the built in spam routing. It filters around 75% of the mail correctly. Good SPAM filtering software can cost around $500 for server side filtering, so hopefully this will get a bit better.
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So with all that said, here is the time and cost. I spent around 12 hours getting everything setup, and with all the reading I did and research for the products. Once the machine was built, installing the OS and setting everything up took around 4-5 hours. Cost is a different issue alone. I already had the hardware, a value of $500-$700. Action Pack software $299, $20 for DDNS, and I already had my VERY capable ZyXel Zywall 5 at $400.
So all in all, this was around a $1500 project, but my out of pocket cost not including my own equipment was around $350 for the software I didn't have.
Sure paying for Exchange hosting elsewhere might be cheaper in the short term, but I am also running my own box, have my own control and have my own Active Directory at home. This gives me great flexibility and is allowing me to do even more than what I have in the past.
So it's expensive to enable exchange push when you setup a server to do it, but it has been worth it, especially for me to have a test machine, as well as a demo box for new/existing clients. It has already come in handy as I just "sold" one of my clients to upgrade their server to the technology with a tech demo of what mine can do.
Just thought I would share in case any of you do this at work, and want to do the same at home, but wanted to know of a good way to do it...
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