OX documentation reg. everything around administrative tasks

[bluelight]

After spending quite some time in the documentation (man pages, wiki and forum) we feel it difficult for a non-OXers (speak community) to get an overview of the features, requirements and administrative skills needed.
To successfully implement OX as an open source project with community participation it would be helpful if more documentation is available. We are starting this thread to open up a possibility for questions and answers of a specific aspect of OX like mail, administrative tasks, LDAP etc. We hope that after some time this information can be summarized and moved to the wiki.

This thread is dedicated to questions around OX and administrative tasks.

The Bluelight Team

[bluelight]

What basic infos do I need as an admin and where is it?

You installed successfully OX. Right, but what now? How do you admin it? Is there a GUI? Is there an ox-shell like in mysql? Where are the man pages? What commands are available in the shell? What basic infos do I need as an admin and where is it?

The commands for the shell can be found in /opt/OX/sbin . Every command can be executed with –help to get more infos. We are wondering if these are all commands available? Is there anything more to know?

The present Open-Xchange Hyperion (Open-Xchange Server GUI Version: 6.6.0-6602 Server Version: 6.5.0-6511 ) doesn't seem to have an admin GUI. Is that correct? What's the plan to implement a similar one like the one in OX5?

[Martin Heiland]

The commands found at /opt/open-xchange/sbin are all a administrator needs to manage the server. To get the full help output about available options for this command, use the "--extendedoptions" switch for those commands where it is available.
Open-Xchange does not have very many objects to handle:
contexts, users, groups, resources

Additionally some commands exist to manage the integration to mandatory backends like the database and the filestorage. A E-Mail server is not a mandatory requirement for Open-Xchange so there are no dedicated management tools for the E-Mail server available, it's only possible to add user credentials of a E-Mail account to a user via the *user command line tools. Because of the large amount of available E-Mail server solutions and the very unconsolidated "market" it would not make sense to write special command line tools for every E-Mail server solution and almost every E-Mail server comes with appropriate administration tools.

It is correct that the Open-Xchange Server 6 has no separate Admin GUI like OX5 had. We had a Admin GUI for the product Open-Xchange Express Edition but you have to distinct clearly between the usage target of the software. Open-Xchange Server 5 was a All-In-One Product which contained all required backends on a supported platform like RHEL or SLES. OX:EE did the same thing on Ubuntu. Both products are not primarily targeted to integration, as said, they are all-in-one solutions. Open-Xchange Server 6 in contrast is intended as a integration solutions. You will see partners offering products that contain OX6 combined with their services and platform integration but platform integration and maintenance is nothing groupware specific so not the primary focus for Open-Xchange. We're offering APIs to enable others to extend the software, for example with a Admin GUI that also does platform dependent tasks. For example, it won't be hard to write some kind of plugin for webmin to administrate the OX6 Server but we will not reinvent the wheel by adding system administration tools to a groupware solution, that's up to partners and thirdparties.

[Carsten Hoeger]

You installed successfully OX. Right, but what now? How do you admin it? Is there a GUI? Is there an ox-shell like in mysql? Where are the man pages? What commands are available in the shell? What basic infos do I need as an admin and where is it?

The commands for the shell can be found in /opt/OX/sbin . Every command can be executed with –help to get more infos. We are wondering if these are all commands available? Is there anything more to know?

The commandline documentation is listed in the Interfaces section of our Wiki Startpage:

http://wiki.open-xchange.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page#Interfaces

Documentation around Configuration, etc can be found in the section Configuration_and_Tweaks:

http://wiki.open-xchange.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page#Configuration_and_Tweaks