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ITSEF Admin | 6 Feb 2012 10:13
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Re: Looking for input from Kontact users

On Friday 9 December 2011 08:27:34 Markus Fendt wrote:
> the problems sound the same we have in the past.
> Setup now:
>
> - kontact e35 special build running on ubuntu 10.04 lts under gnome.
> - home folders mounted via NFS on workstation
> - 170 users
> - wrapper script for kontact (fixed many problems)
> 	* set kde-Home on lokal disk / RAMDISK(very fast and stable)
>         * sync .kde3 only every minute back to NFS (backup reason)
> 	* with this setup we have no more crashes (problem always  was
> writing/reading  .kmailrc over NFS)

Would you mind sharing that script (or scripts) - off-list if you prefer? I'd 
be curious as to how you have solved this part. We were using a similar 
set-up in the past, but this whole "NFS $HOME + some parts local" proved 
rather flaky at the time, hence, we went back to NFS-only - with the 
corresponding performance penalty plus all sorts of vague problems as 
described earlier.

> - in the moment only IMAP Setup

So, no groupware functionality?

Cheerio & thanks for the input,

Thomas
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           Thomas Ribbrock, IT-Team brightsight
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ITSEF Admin | 6 Feb 2012 10:09
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Re: Looking for input from Kontact users

Hi all,

On Thursday 8 December 2011 15:58:37 (UNTRUSTED, sender 
<kolab-users-bounces <at> kolab.org> is not authenticated) wrote:
> This plea for input goes to all folks out there who are using the Kontact
> client in conjunction with Kolab - I am very curious as to your experiences
> and environments, as our own experience with Kontact is extremely bad.
[...]

My sincere apologies to all for not getting back this thread any sooner - a 
nasty fall/freak accident with my bike took me out for a while and picking up 
all work-related pieces again goes slowly (especially as the priorities lie 
on "real work" as opposed to IT... ;-) ). I will answer to some of the 
responses directly but thought it handier to put the general apology 
here... :-}

Cheerio,

Thomas
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           Thomas Ribbrock, IT-Team brightsight
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ITSEF Admin | 6 Feb 2012 10:56
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Re: Looking for input from Kontact users

On Thursday 15 December 2011 11:38:15 Alvin wrote:
> On Thursday 08 December 2011 15:58:37 ITSEF Admin wrote:
> > [...]
> > - What version of Kontact are you using (e35, "the one that came with the
> > distribution", ...)?
>
> Kontact 4.7.4 (The one that comes with Kubuntu 11.10 + PPA)

Right, that's the one we're running a one-user pilot with right now.

> > - On which platform and with how many users?
>
> Only myself. For testing. Other users in the company are using our older
> mail server with Kontact, Thunderbird or Outlook. Only for mail. Kontact
> users have the version that came with Kubuntu 10.04, but are requesting a
> change to Thunderbird due to stability issues.

That is consistent with what we saw - Kontact is far from being stable... :-(

[...]
> > - What are your experiences with Kontact with regard to
> >   * stability (crashes...)
> >   * reliability (lost mail, lost appointments, ....)
> >   * overall "good behaviour"
>
> - When sending mail, plasma often crashes.
> - Some mails can't be marked as read.
> - Loading a message can take several minutes. I just clicked a plain text
> message that is already downloaded. The preview pane says "Retrieving
> Folder Contents" Please wait... In a few minutes, I'll be able to read the
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Andre Heinecke | 6 Feb 2012 19:09
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Re: Looking for input from Kontact users

Hi,

I'm a bit biased here in my opinion as I am working with Kontact for Windows 
but I want to comment some things said here. You have valid concerns and this 
is a remarkably objective thread about problems with Kontact :)
Apologies for not responding inline because of the length of this mail 
already.

First I would disagree here that Kontact is far from being stable, Kontact is 
in a pretty good shape currently bugs get fixed the "Community Q/A" is 
working (by which i mean bugs get reported / triaged / fixed in good time) 
and following it from 4.5 to 4.8 it made so much Progress that i am really 
optimistic that it won't take long to reach most people's definition of 
stable.

As for your issues with multiuser / Virtuoso etc. there is much to be done 
with configuration. MySQL is just the default akonadi database backend, you 
could use PostgreSQL, or even sqlite if you want. All have their advantages 
disadvantages but if you run a dedicated setup for a company you might want 
to customize there and not just take the default.

Akonadi was not designed for single user desktops. The configuration just 
defaults to settings for that.

Same goes for Virtuoso, you probably don't want full file indexing running 
over NFS :) So you need to disable it. And if your users already lived 
without full text search with e.3.5 then they might find it acceptable that 
full text search is turned of system wide before it has ripened a bit more. 
(And that does hugely increase performance overall)
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Alexander Haensch | 7 Feb 2012 12:38
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Re: Looking for input from Kontact users (Andre Heinecke)

I think the same as Andre. Kontact was developing very nicely.
Especially since 4.7.x it is very usable.
I remember a lot of problems with migration from kmail 1 to kmail 2.
Sometimes it was needed to wipe configdirectories, sometimes akonadi was
not able to start..
But now i am using kontact 4.8.0 on Gentoo and its really working good.
In my opinion, many complaints about kontact are originating from old
versions that are packaged in ubuntu 10.04 or different other long term
maintained distros.
If you start using kontact today with 4.7.x, you will not be disappointed.
All these discussed problems with mysql or NFS are not really that
problematic. Why not using a centralized mysql server? Why not keeping
kontact caches local? Where is the reason to mirror it via NFS? It is a
cache of server objects! You do not need it on the server again.

regards,
Alexander
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Maria Hunger | 7 Feb 2012 15:37
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need help - group imap with two domains?

hi everybody.

i've got a question about the use of group folders in kolab2 and horde  
and didn't found an answer in any forums or the kolab manual. maybe  
you can help...

i've got two domains (domain1.com and domain2.com) and
seperatly from each other they work very well.

but now i want to add a user with user <at> domain1.com to a group imap  
group <at> domain2.com, even better with a second mailadress for the user  
(user <at> domain2.com).

because i can't create a second mail for the same name i created an  
alias for the user (user <at> domain2.com). actually, this alias works well  
(i can write and receive mails which are sent/write directly to this  
mailadress)

but i can't add the alias mailadress to a group imap of the  
domain2.com. if i do so, kolab changes the mailadress automaticly back  
to the mainadress (user <at> domain1.com). and in horde, the user don't has  
access to the group folders and can't receive any mails send to the  
group <at> domain2.com

has anybody an idea? is it even possible in kolab2?

thx and greetings, m.

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Alvin | 7 Feb 2012 17:34
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Re: Looking for input from Kontact users

On 6/02/2012 10:56, ITSEF Admin wrote:
> On Thursday 15 December 2011 11:38:15 Alvin wrote:
>> On Thursday 08 December 2011 15:58:37 ITSEF Admin wrote:
>>> [...]
>>> - What version of Kontact are you using (e35, "the one that came with the
>>> distribution", ...)?
>>
>> Kontact 4.7.4 (The one that comes with Kubuntu 11.10 + PPA)
> 
> Right, that's the one we're running a one-user pilot with right now.

In the meantime, Kubuntu released KDE 4.8 in the backports repository.

>>> - On which platform and with how many users?
>>
>> Only myself. For testing. Other users in the company are using our older
>> mail server with Kontact, Thunderbird or Outlook. Only for mail. Kontact
>> users have the version that came with Kubuntu 10.04, but are requesting a
>> change to Thunderbird due to stability issues.
> 
> That is consistent with what we saw - Kontact is far from being stable... :-(

Maybe it's too soon to say, but on first sight, KDE 4.8 is a step in the
right direction. Others on the kubuntu-users mailing agree.

>>> - What are your experiences with Kontact with regard to
>>>   [...]

I had to reconfigure Kontact. I'm now using it with 1 small account on
Kolab. Akonadi runs on a local PostgreSQL. At first sight, things look
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Heiner Markert | 7 Feb 2012 19:55
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Re: Looking for input from Kontact users

Hi,

I experience the following bugs:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=292210
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=286036
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=277905
and
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=285743
with all KDE 4.7.X and 4.8.X kontact clients.

The last bug renders the calendar component useless to me, as it introduces a bug that displays repeating
events created with an older/other (e.g. horde!) client at the wrong time in either summer- or winter time.
Furthermore, there are massive encoding problems with kjots, such that notes created with e35 get not
displayed correctly in recent KDE, and vice versa.

After discovering the above mentioned bugs, I gave up with recent kontact and switched the clients back to
kontact from KDE 3.5.10, which is available from opensuse in their current 12.1 release. This works quite
stable, with DIMAP on NFSv4 home directory not being a problem.

When I started using kolab/kontact about 4 years ago (KDE 3.5), everything worked rock-solid and stable.
Unfortunately, this does not seem to hold with current kontact versions.

Regards
Heiner

Am Thursday 08 December 2011 15:58:37 schrieb ITSEF Admin:
> Hi all,
> 
> This plea for input goes to all folks out there who are using the Kontact 
> client in conjunction with Kolab - I am very curious as to your experiences
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ITSEF Admin | 8 Feb 2012 12:20
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Re: Looking for input from Kontact users (Andre Heinecke)

On Tuesday 7 February 2012 12:38:27 Alexander Haensch wrote:
> I think the same as Andre. Kontact was developing very nicely.
> Especially since 4.7.x it is very usable.
> I remember a lot of problems with migration from kmail 1 to kmail 2.

So this will be another nightmare waiting for us should we decide to stay with 
Kontact? I've seen these remarks several times and they do not help... 
Currently, we still use e35 under Kubuntu 10.04 - and if wiping the config 
was all that is needed I'd be almost happy...

[...]
> If you start using kontact today with 4.7.x, you will not be disappointed.

The pilot looks somewhat promising so far, but that's only a single user (and 
not one of those that had the most problems) at the moment, so the jury is 
still out.

> All these discussed problems with mysql or NFS are not really that
> problematic. Why not using a centralized mysql server? Why not keeping
> kontact caches local? Where is the reason to mirror it via NFS? It is a
> cache of server objects! You do not need it on the server again.

Why? Simplicity. I have a home directory. I mount it from the NFS server and I 
expect everything to work then without additional effort. That's the way it 
has been in Unix-environments for a long time (yes, I am aware of NFS' 
problems and I know this is a simplified statement...). Now I suddenly have 
to invent all sorts of extra configurations, scripts and whatnot just to keep 
a few applications happy and to separate their stuff from all the other stuff 
that's normally stored in $HOME, thus incurring extra work, extra points of 
failure and extra need for testing. At the very least this is a nuissance...
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ITSEF Admin | 8 Feb 2012 12:51
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Re: Looking for input from Kontact users

On Monday 6 February 2012 19:09:16 Andre Heinecke wrote:
[...]
> First I would disagree here that Kontact is far from being stable, Kontact
> is in a pretty good shape currently bugs get fixed the "Community Q/A" is
> working (by which i mean bugs get reported / triaged / fixed in good time)
[...]

Ok, I want to be fair here: Our experiences with Kontact were all e35, i.e. 
Kontact 3.5.x as maintained by Kolab. With those versions, stability in terms 
of crashes was abysimal in the beginning, but improved quite a bit over time. 
However, I would still not describe it as "stable" - there are just too many 
reports of the type "Kontact crashed on me again" coming in from our users. 
Based on this, our expectations for Kontact 4.x are very low - it will have 
to prove itself. The bigger problem, however, is reliability in terms of "how 
often can I not properly access my mail" - which is what I described in my 
original mail. Granted, that part seems to have worsened since we're running 
KDE4 as platform underneath e35, but it was never good in our experience. I'm 
already happy that we're no longer randomly losing appointments in the 
calendars - this problem was so bad that many of our users still do not trust 
the groupware part to this day. Again, it will be an uphill battle for 
Kontact 4.x to overcome those reservations.

[...]
> As for your issues with multiuser / Virtuoso etc. there is much to be done
> with configuration. MySQL is just the default akonadi database backend, you
> could use PostgreSQL, or even sqlite if you want.

From what I've seen in the docs, I definitely do *not* want to use sqlite - 
the warnings of its shortcomings were pretty clear, 
thank-you-very-much... :-}
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