5 ms·

As usual with all these types of posts, people go "HA HA, MICRO$OFT SUCKS" without understanding business practices that keep them afloat. Don't use Exchange?

As usual with all these types of posts, people go "HA HA, MICRO$OFT SUCKS" without understanding business practices that keep them afloat. Don't use Exchange? Cool, what should we use instead? Does it support 15 people all the way up to 150000 people? I used to run Exchange cluster for 70k people, is there other mail software out there complete with non-shared disk redundancy? Where the users connect to single endpoint and software figures it out from there? Sharepoint with another 2 RCEs. Not shocked, the software is terrible. However, it's only software that will stand up under load and let us shard it easily. All open-source software is one of those, runs fine in Homelab, likely falls down under load. Few Open Source Developers want to work on this stuff which I get because it's tedious work interfacing with computer illiterate end users. I'd rather chug sewage then do this work for free. Finally, it's somewhat backwards compatible. Most businesses are filled with ancient software that no one has worked on in 20 years. That Excel document with Macros from 1997. With some registry changes degrading security posture, still works. I doubt you will find Office software with level of backwards compatibility unless they are using Microsoft Office level of compatibility. Microsoft has real gordian knot here and few solutions besides "Backwards compatibility is OVER. Upgrade to modern or GTFO". Meanwhile, I get hit up by $ThreeJobsAgo over some Exchange Web Services solution I slapped together for them in Python they wanted me to upgrade to GraphAPI since Microsoft turned off Exchange Web Services in Office365.

bad_haircut72 1y ago
I mean this is nuclear wepons were talking about, who cares about features vs security? They could run the department on snail mail if they tried
nerdponx 1y ago
> Few Open Source Developers want to work on this stuff which I get because it's tedious work interfacing with computer illiterate end users. I'd rather chug sewage then do this work for free. Or the government could pay people to work on said open source software, providing a benefit to the public along the way. The US government started something like this called "18F" under the Obama administration. It was so effective at making software that was useful to the American public that Trump promptly shut it down 2 months into his second term, in no small part because they had the temerity to develop free-to-use tax filing software. See https://handbook.tts.gsa.gov/18f/history-and-values/ https://handbook.tts.gsa.gov/18f/history-and-values/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://handbook.tts.gsa.gov/18f/history-and-values/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://handbook... https://archive.is/CIXG1 https://archive.is/CIXG1 and https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/learning-from-the-legacy-of-18f https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/learning-from-the-legac... https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/learning-from-the-legacy-of-18f https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://www.lawf... https://archive.is/fmaf6 https://archive.is/fmaf6
BeetleB 1y ago
How oh how did these nuclear weapons facilities manage to function in the days before Exchange and Sharepoint?
- stackskipton 1y ago
  Just like everyone else before invention of Email and Document sharing? However, like every other business, no one is willing to slow down velocity for security reasons so now we are here. Unless you have a fix for "Line must go up", market pressures will always cause this.
  - awesome_dude 1y ago
    Um, email was invented, like in the last millenium, well before Microsoft was a thing (only slightly sarky)
    - dlgeek 1y ago
      Microsoft was a thing before email. Microsoft was founded in 1975. The standard for SMTP wasn't published in 1981. Most early predecessors were the late 70s.
      - awesome_dude 1y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email In 1971 Ray Tomlinson sent the first mail message between two computers on the ARPANET, introducing the now-familiar address syntax with the '@' symbol designating the user's system address.[2][3][4][5] Over a series of RFCs, conventions were refined for sending mail messages over the File Transfer Protocol. Several other email networks developed in the 1970s and expanded subsequently. Proprietary electronic mail systems began to emerge in the 1970s and early 1980s. IBM developed a primitive in-house solution for office automation over the period 1970–1972, and replaced it with OFS (Office System), providing mail transfer between individuals, in 1974.
  - BeetleB 1y ago
necovek 1y ago
I see you build a case for traditional MS product in Exchange, yet this issue is about Sharepoint. Just like with Windows, Microsoft has built a moat with Exchange, but the question is why do all the companies buy into their full ecosystem, especially for anything relating to web technologies (you even bring up Exchange Web Services), because this they do really badly, and Sharepoint seems to be the worst. However, I am certain there are big Postfix/Dovecot installations scaling easily to 150k people, but we probably wouldn't know about them. Eg. here a couple of accounts of people doing that: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxadmin/comments/32fq67/how_would_you_setup_a_large_mail_server_on/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxadmin/comments/32fq67/how_woul...
- elevation 1y ago
  Not sure the total number, but a university near me serves 50K active students and hundreds of thousands of alums with Postfix/Dovecot.
- inopinatus 1y ago
  I was running millions of accounts using Postfix/Dovecot on shared-nothing storage with a single MUA-facing endpoint and complex policy options, and that was over a decade ago. Fastmail today would be much bigger again, and they’re on CMU Cyrus. 150k is rookie numbers. Perhaps that was meant ironically to satirise mediocre enterprise thinking?
  - stackskipton 1y ago
    Cool, you got a blog article detailing how that works with Postfix/Dovecot? All clustering articles I'm seeing for those involved shared storage. Fastmail is not very specific how that works. In any case, Exchange is not just email, it has Calendaring/Contacts stuff going on as well.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - Spooky23 1y ago
Staniel 1y ago
Why is this comment glowing? \s
vlovich123 1y ago
You can use hosted versions of Google Workplace or Office365 if you can’t figure out how to secure software (places like this typically can’t clearly). Additionally it enforces a separation of concerns where a compromise of your email server doesn’t lead to a compromise of the plant itself (again - clearly IT didn’t know how to partition the network into different parts).
- stackskipton 1y ago
  Sure, this business should have converted to either of those and let someone else take over administration since they were clearly negligent. This is stuff that FedRAMP or it's replacement was supposed to fix but didn't.
  - vlovich123 1y ago
    FedRAMP is only for hosted software for the federal government afaik, not on-prem and not private companies (nuclear reactors afaik are operated by grids/private operators and the federal gov is responsible for auditing and regulating)
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
elevation 1y ago
How many organizations on the planet require their Exchange server to support 150k users? I doubt most manufacturing plants fall into this category.
- stackskipton 1y ago
  They don't but whole point is massive Enterprises use the software, people get accustomed to it and want it in their smaller business. So, Microsoft Small Business Server is developed until O365 came along.
dudeinjapan 1y ago
Sharepoint is enterprisey and all but how about "less software/surface area is more" when it comes to nuclear silos?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
int_19h 1y ago
Exchange has valid arguments for it, but I don't think SharePoint has anything going for it other than "we already got a license for that as part of out package deal". As software in its own right, it's uniquely bad even for Microsoft.
zelphirkalt 1y ago
> Sharepoint with another 2 RCEs. Not shocked, the software is terrible. However, it's only software that will stand up under load and let us shard it easily. All open-source software is one of those, runs fine in Homelab, likely falls down under load. Few Open Source Developers want to work on this stuff which I get because it's tedious work interfacing with computer illiterate end users. I'd rather chug sewage then do this work for free. All just empty claims without showing any evidence. Did you ever set up a multi-client syncthing setup to test your theories about it falling over? Or do you have any references, pointing us to analysis, that shows, that any such tool doesn't hold water? What about some bit torrent setups? There are many options in this space, and one doesn't even have to lump synchronization and viewing in a web UI into one service. If one doesn't, then there are many tools that can accomplish the job better than Sharepoint. And btw. paid MS Office doesn't even hold water for some 80 people, delivering me my e-mails some half an hour later, at a snail's pace, one or two a minute, while my 1 EUR per month free software using e-mail provider (posteo) manages to give me all my new e-mail almost instantly, the moment I open Thunderbird.
- stackskipton 1y ago
  Your replacement for Sharepoint is BitTorrent or Syncthing? Yes, there is other tools, none of them is as integrated as Microsoft suite except other cloud only options like Google Workspace and other cloudy software.
bawolff 1y ago
> Sharepoint with another 2 RCEs. Not shocked, the software is terrible. However, it's only software that will stand up under load and let us shard it easily. All open-source software is one of those, runs fine in Homelab, likely falls down under load. Few Open Source Developers want to work on this stuff which I get because it's tedious work interfacing with computer illiterate end users. I'd rather chug sewage then do this work for free. Isn't sharepoint just a file share server? (Ive never used it) I'm sure solutions like samba or an ftp server hold up fine under the load. Its really more a UI question.
- swarnie 1y ago
  Find me an FTP server which integrates with your entire productivity, communication and collaboration suites easily enough that an admin can run a 50k person company off of it and equally Doris from accounts can manage to get some work done. I hate SharePoint, but i use/administer it every day and it works, mostly. Exposing it to the internet is a mistake. Why anyone would do that is beyond me.
  - bawolff 1y ago
    Like i said, its a UI issue not a scalability issue.
- p_ing 1y ago
  No, but storing files is one of it's core functions. The wiki [0] has a decent outline of what it is (may or may not be out of date for on-prem). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SharePoint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SharePoint

bad_haircut72 1y ago

I mean this is nuclear wepons were talking about, who cares about features vs security? They could run the department on snail mail if they tried

nerdponx 1y ago

> Few Open Source Developers want to work on this stuff which I get because it's tedious work interfacing with computer illiterate end users. I'd rather chug sewage then do this work for free. Or the government could pay people to work on said open source software, providing a benefit to the public along the way. The US government started something like this called "18F" under the Obama administration. It was so effective at making software that was useful to the American public that Trump promptly shut it down 2 months into his second term, in no small part because they had the temerity to develop free-to-use tax filing software. See https://handbook.tts.gsa.gov/18f/history-and-values/ https://handbook.tts.gsa.gov/18f/history-and-values/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://handbook.tts.gsa.gov/18f/history-and-values/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://handbook... https://archive.is/CIXG1 https://archive.is/CIXG1 and https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/learning-from-the-legacy-of-18f https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/learning-from-the-legac... https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/learning-from-the-legacy-of-18f https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://www.lawf... https://archive.is/fmaf6 https://archive.is/fmaf6

BeetleB 1y ago

How oh how did these nuclear weapons facilities manage to function in the days before Exchange and Sharepoint?

stackskipton 1y ago
Just like everyone else before invention of Email and Document sharing? However, like every other business, no one is willing to slow down velocity for security reasons so now we are here. Unless you have a fix for "Line must go up", market pressures will always cause this.
- awesome_dude 1y ago
  Um, email was invented, like in the last millenium, well before Microsoft was a thing (only slightly sarky)
  - dlgeek 1y ago
    Microsoft was a thing before email. Microsoft was founded in 1975. The standard for SMTP wasn't published in 1981. Most early predecessors were the late 70s.
    - awesome_dude 1y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email In 1971 Ray Tomlinson sent the first mail message between two computers on the ARPANET, introducing the now-familiar address syntax with the '@' symbol designating the user's system address.[2][3][4][5] Over a series of RFCs, conventions were refined for sending mail messages over the File Transfer Protocol. Several other email networks developed in the 1970s and expanded subsequently. Proprietary electronic mail systems began to emerge in the 1970s and early 1980s. IBM developed a primitive in-house solution for office automation over the period 1970–1972, and replaced it with OFS (Office System), providing mail transfer between individuals, in 1974.
- BeetleB 1y ago

necovek 1y ago

I see you build a case for traditional MS product in Exchange, yet this issue is about Sharepoint. Just like with Windows, Microsoft has built a moat with Exchange, but the question is why do all the companies buy into their full ecosystem, especially for anything relating to web technologies (you even bring up Exchange Web Services), because this they do really badly, and Sharepoint seems to be the worst. However, I am certain there are big Postfix/Dovecot installations scaling easily to 150k people, but we probably wouldn't know about them. Eg. here a couple of accounts of people doing that: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxadmin/comments/32fq67/how_would_you_setup_a_large_mail_server_on/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxadmin/comments/32fq67/how_woul...

elevation 1y ago
Not sure the total number, but a university near me serves 50K active students and hundreds of thousands of alums with Postfix/Dovecot.
inopinatus 1y ago
I was running millions of accounts using Postfix/Dovecot on shared-nothing storage with a single MUA-facing endpoint and complex policy options, and that was over a decade ago. Fastmail today would be much bigger again, and they’re on CMU Cyrus. 150k is rookie numbers. Perhaps that was meant ironically to satirise mediocre enterprise thinking?
- stackskipton 1y ago
  Cool, you got a blog article detailing how that works with Postfix/Dovecot? All clustering articles I'm seeing for those involved shared storage. Fastmail is not very specific how that works. In any case, Exchange is not just email, it has Calendaring/Contacts stuff going on as well.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- Spooky23 1y ago

Staniel 1y ago

Why is this comment glowing? \s

vlovich123 1y ago

You can use hosted versions of Google Workplace or Office365 if you can’t figure out how to secure software (places like this typically can’t clearly). Additionally it enforces a separation of concerns where a compromise of your email server doesn’t lead to a compromise of the plant itself (again - clearly IT didn’t know how to partition the network into different parts).

stackskipton 1y ago
Sure, this business should have converted to either of those and let someone else take over administration since they were clearly negligent. This is stuff that FedRAMP or it's replacement was supposed to fix but didn't.
- vlovich123 1y ago
  FedRAMP is only for hosted software for the federal government afaik, not on-prem and not private companies (nuclear reactors afaik are operated by grids/private operators and the federal gov is responsible for auditing and regulating)

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

elevation 1y ago

How many organizations on the planet require their Exchange server to support 150k users? I doubt most manufacturing plants fall into this category.

stackskipton 1y ago
They don't but whole point is massive Enterprises use the software, people get accustomed to it and want it in their smaller business. So, Microsoft Small Business Server is developed until O365 came along.

dudeinjapan 1y ago

Sharepoint is enterprisey and all but how about "less software/surface area is more" when it comes to nuclear silos?

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

int_19h 1y ago

Exchange has valid arguments for it, but I don't think SharePoint has anything going for it other than "we already got a license for that as part of out package deal". As software in its own right, it's uniquely bad even for Microsoft.

zelphirkalt 1y ago

> Sharepoint with another 2 RCEs. Not shocked, the software is terrible. However, it's only software that will stand up under load and let us shard it easily. All open-source software is one of those, runs fine in Homelab, likely falls down under load. Few Open Source Developers want to work on this stuff which I get because it's tedious work interfacing with computer illiterate end users. I'd rather chug sewage then do this work for free. All just empty claims without showing any evidence. Did you ever set up a multi-client syncthing setup to test your theories about it falling over? Or do you have any references, pointing us to analysis, that shows, that any such tool doesn't hold water? What about some bit torrent setups? There are many options in this space, and one doesn't even have to lump synchronization and viewing in a web UI into one service. If one doesn't, then there are many tools that can accomplish the job better than Sharepoint. And btw. paid MS Office doesn't even hold water for some 80 people, delivering me my e-mails some half an hour later, at a snail's pace, one or two a minute, while my 1 EUR per month free software using e-mail provider (posteo) manages to give me all my new e-mail almost instantly, the moment I open Thunderbird.

stackskipton 1y ago
Your replacement for Sharepoint is BitTorrent or Syncthing? Yes, there is other tools, none of them is as integrated as Microsoft suite except other cloud only options like Google Workspace and other cloudy software.

bawolff 1y ago

swarnie 1y ago
Find me an FTP server which integrates with your entire productivity, communication and collaboration suites easily enough that an admin can run a 50k person company off of it and equally Doris from accounts can manage to get some work done. I hate SharePoint, but i use/administer it every day and it works, mostly. Exposing it to the internet is a mistake. Why anyone would do that is beyond me.
- bawolff 1y ago
  Like i said, its a UI issue not a scalability issue.
p_ing 1y ago
No, but storing files is one of it's core functions. The wiki [0] has a decent outline of what it is (may or may not be out of date for on-prem). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SharePoint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SharePoint