geek: July 2006 Archives
We recently opted to use www.fasthosts.co.uk hosted Exchange Server for our email requirements at work. Price, support and features are generally very good. However, there's one drawback to be aware of in case you're thinking of doing the same (or already are). That is, top level Public Folders* are not made private to the domains they belong to. You cannot even set user access levels manually. Whatever top level Public Folders you have are visible to any other Fastshosts customer on the same server. They are only visible if you use IMAP to connect to the server, but visible they are.
Much remonstration with the tech support later and they stuck to their guns: allowing us to secure access to Public Folders at the top level to our own users only was not part of the standard installation. The workaround was to create sub folders under the top level. User access can be set at this level.
Quite why Fasthosts think it necessary to stop customers from using the top level safely and securely, I don't know. They don't appear to make it public knowledge (can't find anything on their support pages) that putting your Contact list in Public Folders > Contacts will make that list viewable by any other customer using the same server, so I suspect many customers will have done so without knowing. You have been warned...
* Top level Public Folders in this context are the folders found immediately under the domain in the Public Folders tree
The basic set up is pretty easy point and click stuff. The one tricky bit was getting IIS to run CGI scripts at all. That's because it comes with just about everything switched off by default as a security measure. What you need to do is make sure the Web Service Extension for CGI scripts is enabled. With Activestate's current build of Perl (5.8.8 at time of writing) the CGI extension is automatically added. However, it still needs enabling under Web Service Extensions.
VisualWin have an excellent article on how to set it up.
The two things that had me stuck for hours when setting up FastCGI were:
1. It will not install if your /etc/httpd/logs/ directory is a symbolic link. The solution was to move all logs somewhere with lots of space, reconfigure Apache to use the new location for logging, replace the symlink with a real logs directory and then install. Of course, if you're happy with log files being written in /etc/ then keep them there if you like. Remember to update logsrotate to point at the new location of your log files and reload or restart Apache.
2. You need httpd-devel installed. I used yum to do this painlessly.
FastCGI installed fine after the 4 hours of banging my head against the wall over those two slightly undocumented requirements.
