0919ELSEADM Introduction

The Official X-Itools ELSE 0.9.19 Administrator's HOWTO

Edited by Nicolas HAHN < hahnn@x-itools.com > / < hahnn@erios.org >

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This page for version: 0.9.16
Top: Documentation for Administrators | Next: Requirements

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• Introduction
  • What is the X-Itools ELSE?
  • Why the ELSE?
  • Why this HOWTO?
  • What is documented in this HOWTO, for whom?

Introduction

This HOWTO is primarily designed for the administrators of the X-Itools ELSE software.
Before to read this HOWTO as an ELSE administrator, it's also strongly recommended you read the User's HOWTO.

People that will use the X-Itools ELSE software on a daily basis should better read the User's HOWTO.
People that will install and configure the X-Itools ELSE software will also benefit of reading this HOWTO, even if we'll not write here about installation and configuration of the software on a Linux server.

What is the X-Itools ELSE?

The X-Itools project was born in 2001, and first publication under GNU GPL v2 license was made in July 2001.

X-Itools means eXtended Internet/Intranet tools. This project was coded in C++, HTML, Javascript and the aim was to propose a set of web based modules to end users allowing them to work in a shared environment. Some modules proposed some features, in 2001, that weren't existing until then.

Then time passed and other projects of collaborative tools have been introduced to the community and met the success, like Horde/IMP framework, Zimbra, Evolution, and others. Still today, the old X-Itools project have integrated modules that are not existing in other products, and is still used by some organizations.

In 2004, for the personal hosting needs of the project's author, another X-Itools module has been developed: the E-mail Log Manager. This (still web "1.0" based) X-Itools module allowed centralized management and correlation of Postfix SMTP server logs collected in a PostgreSQL database. While this module was deployed on several SMTP servers for the private hosting activities of the author, it was never made available and published on Sourceforge repository. It stayed in the private CVS repository of the author, and became a standalone software having no dependencies any more with the X-Itools global software.

End of 2011, at the favour of a consulting mission, this X-Itools module has been presented to an organization branch of a world-wide non-profit organization (United Nations). This branch is called UNICC (United Nations International Computing Center), based in Geneva, New York, and having offices in Spain, Italy, and other countries.

UNICC has been interested by this module - now a standalone product using latest web "2.0" technologies - to manage, debug, protect all the messaging activities and servers running Postfix and/or Microsoft Exchange.

This X-Itools specific software is now known under the name ELSE, which is for E-mail Log Search Engine. Of course, it doesn't do only Log parsing, but much more.
UNICC is still today (September 2013) a major contributor of the ELSE, in the way they use it, the other UN organizations are using it, and the ELSE is processing an absolutely enormous global email flow spread over several datacenters. In this, the author can find all the volume in term of traffic and all the "strange issues" that allow him to enhance and to code the ELSE.

Today, all the time available is attributed to the coding and to the maintenance of the ELSE. The parent project, X-Itools globally speaking, is sleeping.

Why the ELSE?

Managing several Postfix servers, the author had a big frustration for several years, like a lot of other UNIX admins managing Postfix servers. This frustration was born a long time ago, seeing there was no "good-enough" tool (understand user-friendly, having a nice user oriented design, having a nice GUI, not being a UNIX command line needing a lot of options and generating crappy reports, having good set of features, really helping admins to manage their messaging servers on a day to day basis, not spending hours and hours reading SMTP logs trying solving an issue, issuing a lot of grep, sed, awk... piped commands...) to exploit logs to solve SMTP related issues.

In clear, using pflogsum was probably good and you might have been looking as a perfect geek, but sorry, at some point it's not enough. The author wanted more than that!

The author also had the wish to start learning PHP and ExtJS framework by the practice. The ELSE product is accomplishing this goal, from his perspective. Of course, if good developers or purists in those languages take a look at the source code, they will for sure say it's made by a beginner. That may be true :)
But as of today, the product have appreciated features and is working fine. And anybody is free to enhance it, to participate to the project, and to share, then the author will certainly use their knowledge to enhance his poor one ;-)

Also, the community requested for years something not limited to parsing logs and provide a small text report as output, working with flat files, made by scripting for most of them and then slow by nature. The community asked several times, on various web sites, blogs, forums, mailing lists... to have a real product able to parse the SMTP logs in real time, and using a database as backend.

And finally, we all perfectly know we aren't living in a perfect world. What we mean is that the world is not only using Open Source products: that would be a nice dream :-)
So, because Postfix SMTP servers and Microsoft Exchange servers are the most used ones across the world from the experience of the author, he wanted a tool that would be able to handle and correlate the logs from both of those systems.

For all those reasons and some others, the ELSE was born, and is integrating more and more "active" features, in addition to the "passive" ones that are logs analysis.

Why this HOWTO?

Well, spending time to code is one thing. But at some point, adding also the fact a minimum of documentation is requested by current users of the ELSE, it became necessary to start to write something.

Then, if you want your Open Source software to be known and more and more deployed as the time pass, it's necessary to at least, provide a minimum documentation for the end-users of the ELSE.

Finally, starting to document the ELSE now in September 2013, is a good time, as the author consider the set of features of the ELSE is now enough (but that's just a point of view) and a little bit of time can be given to documentation.

What is documented in this HOWTO, for whom?

As the ELSE product is ONLY designed for Postfix SMTP server and Microsoft Exchange server, you can immediately stop to read this HOWTO if you are using other SMTP softwares.

This HOWTO is administrator user oriented. It includes documentation about the ELSE management features, like:

• How do I manage ELSE users?
• How do I assign SMTP servers and/or domains to ELSE users?
• How do I monitor the activity of the ELSE users?

Who are considered the ELSE administrators?

• Service Desk staff managers, of an ISP for instance
• First level Messaging Engineers, messaging architects
• Generally speaking, people in charge of managing rights and permissions of other staffs

This HOWTO is not end-user oriented. It will not speak about the features available to end-users only in the User Interface, which is another documentation.

This HOWTO is not SysAdmins oriented. It will not speak about the installation and configuration of the ELSE as well as of all its dependencies.

However, for your personal knowledge, it's recommended to all kind of audiences to read this HOWTO.

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This page for version: 0.9.16