Jakob und das Diplom

Mein Lernprojekt, das ich begleitend zu der Veranstaltung Studieren im Mitmachnetz bearbeiten werde, ist meine Diplomarbeit. Das vorläufige Thema meiner Arbeit ist Centralized Mail Management with LDAP. Sie ist eher praktisch angehaucht und kümmert sich um die relativ neue Möglichkeit von Postfix, alle Daten aus einem LDAP-Server zu beziehen — in meinem Fall also der LDAP-Server, den ich vor einigen Jahren bei meiner Arbeit eingeführt habe. Darüber hinaus muss eine solche Lösung natürlich nicht nur für die Maschinen funktionieren (das tut sie schon), sondern auch für den Menschen: Ein Verwaltungsinterface muss gefunden werden und da keins gefunden werden konnte, erstellt werden. Zu guter Letzt soll das neue Verzeichnis-basierte System mit dem alten RDBMS verglichen werden, um zu prüfen ob außer der einfacheren Verwaltung auch Performancesteigerung zu erkennen ist.

Wen mehr Details zu der Arbeit interessieren, hier die Übersicht aus meinem Expose. (Auf englisch, da die Arbeit auch auf englisch geschrieben wird.)

This work is being written at the Bremen International School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS), an institute at the University Bremen and the Jacobs University. The BIGSSS has around 150 users and over 250 active mail accounts. There is also already a LDAP server deployed, that serves as authentication server for a couple of services like Primary Domain Controller (PDC) (using Samba), Groupware and web mailer (using SOGo), Content Management System (CMS) (using Typo3) and some smaller services. But there is still a separate database only for mail users and settings. The goal is to check the possibilities to eliminate that database and setup the mail server to use the LDAP database instead.

The work opens up a couple of challenges: One problem is to duplicate the current working setup. Users have multiple mail addresses on different domains and can have forwards to external mail accounts instead of local delivery. The mailing lists can be nested and can include external addresses. That was a problem for Postfix with an LDAP backend in the past and this work needs to find out if it is now really possible to do.

Since a directory server is used as a backend to the mail server, it is necessary to check if the performance of the directory server is high enough to handle the load of the thousands of incoming mails and authentication requests.

Another difficulty is that the mail server is already deployed and running in production mode. The transition to the new authentication and data backend has to be as smooth as possible without disrupting the daily work with the mail server.

The last problem this work will be dealing with, is the administration of the new system. Currently the BIGSSS uses a web based software named GOsa to manage the LDAP users. It has to be checked if the software is suited to setup mail accounts properly. A first review suggested that it doesn’t and that it would be necessary to write a plugin for GOsa to enhance it.

This work is going to answer the following questions: Is it currently possible to use LDAP as data backend for mail servers in a medium sized company? That includes performance measures to make sure the directory server can handle the load of requests and also manageability, since there needs to be a way to manage email users and mailing lists. It is going to be tested at a real world problem at the BIGSSS.