Good Stalker

A long, long time ago in an interwebs far, far away there was a product named Stalker Internet Mail Server (SIMS) that ran on Macintosh System 7.  In that same interwebs, some guy named Mookie was building a server using an old PowerMac 7100 -- one that was given to him out of pity and charity.  He was a young apprentice at the time and could not afford to buy hardware nor software.  So, he scoured around and found SIMS.  SIMS worked brilliantly, especially the free version that gave him a few mailboxes and did exactly what he needed.  After a while, Mookie started building servers using Linux and soon forgot about SIMS.  That is until recently. My ongoing search for software or a service that will let me synchronize my iPhone without cables has come to an end.  This is all because I found a product by those Stalker guys, now known as Communigate Systems (personally, I think Stalker is a cooler name) .  SIMS has grown up and is now named Communigate Pro. During this growin' up period, SIMS also developed new skills, mainly groupware skills -- tasks, contacts and calendaring.  And, those Stalker guys have a community version of Communigate Pro that is free for those of us who do not need to host 25+ people.  The community version of Communigate Pro is exactly the same as the commercial version and lets me host five users -- if I go over the five user limit, the software swithces into trial mode for the commerical version.  Booyah, free software. The other night, I reimaged my old VAIO notebook (a paltry Pentium 3 900MHz, 512MB RAM, and 80GB HDD) which has a busted space key (Jacob ripped if off).  I reimaged it with CentOS 5.2 because after trying to get my Debian/Ubuntu mojo on, I couldn't -- so, I returned to my roots, RHEL where I know how to get shtuff done.  Using the small, slow notebook for a server is great because after turning on the ultrapower save mode in the BIOS, the thing runs at 500MHz all day long.  There is no noise because the fan doesn't run.  It sits and runs quietly all day long.  I setup a dynamic hostname over at DynDNS and got Communigate Pro working. So here are my notes about my Communigate Pro experience so far:

• Installation was damn easy:  Install one RPM file.
• Configuration, on the other hand, was a pain.  There are a LOT of configuration options for Communigate Pro (CGP), which is not a bad thing per se.  And there is a whole bunch of documentation (witness the 1068 page manual).  But, the documentation, though plentiful is not well-written, nor is it well-organized.  I had a frustrating time getting things going at the start.
• There are three types of web interfaces available: HTML (no AJAX), Flash, and Adobe AIR.  I couldn't try the AIR interface because it does not deal with self-signed SSL certs very well (think 1,000,000 "are you sure?" dialogue boxes).  The HTML interface is functional -- and the only place to export data -- but very, very sparse.  The Flash interface is very useful.
• Data support is excellent.  I imported all my contacts via the web interface using standard vCard files.  It also imports contacts in bulk.  I also imported my calendar events via the web interface using standard iCalendar files.  There are also options to export to vCard and iCalendar formats from the web interface.  Tres cool.
• ActiveSync (or as Communigate Systems calls it "AirSync") works brilliantly.  The ActiveSync implementation of calendaring events even supports multiple calendars.  And because of this, the iPhone can show color-coded calendar events.
• Remote Wipe.  It works.  I tested it.  It completely formatted my iPhone and put it into an unactivated state.
• The web calendaring system and the backend system do not support alerts for calendaring events (a big "WTF?" in my book).  I don't make too big of a deal here when compared with MobileMe because CGP is free.  I hope that Communigate Systems updates the software to at least store and sync calendar event alerts in future revisions.
• Contact pictures are synchronized between iPhone and CGP!  Win!  This never happened with the hosted Exchange setup or Zimbra setup.  Nice.
• All data on the backend is stored as flat text files.  I think this is very cool since I can just tar up those files and throw them onto external storage for backups -- which, I do.
• Cost.  Did I mention CGP is free for those of you who don't need more than five users?
• From running the server for a day and a half now, it looks like it does not take much to run -- it runs fine on my small notebook and ps shows that it only uses around 15MB of RAM.