I've found running a mail server on Debian to be relatively straightforward, with the caveat that I outsource my spam filtering to Lux Scientiae, Inc. (https://luxsci.com/) (which is apparently one Erik Kangas (MIT PhD), and Somerville-local) for $10/mo., because maintaining my own SpamAssassin instance is Way Too Much Work kthx. LuxSci is in its turn a reseller for McAfee nee MXLogic's spam-filtering service, but I've been quite happy with the quality of the filtering (very few false positives) and the service overall. I point my MX records for my domains at their servers and they forward ham to my mail server. For a client I use Sup (http://sup.rubyforge.org), which is basically GMail reimplemented in ncurses, with which I'm quite happy. It has all the fast full-text search and threading and labels and so on you've come to expect from GMail. I've also found hosting my own Jabber server on Debian using ejabberd quite effective and straightforward, and that lets me talk to people on any of the big Jabber services (LJ, GTalk, Facebook, MIT, jabber.org, etc.) or their own Jabber servers transparently; federation is awesome. I use BarnOwl as my Jabber client, so Jabber messages flow together nicely with my zephyrs and twitters and so on.
My house (http://asec.aperturehosting.net) uses a MediaWiki install hosted out of a SIPB AFS locker via Scripts (http://scripts.mit.edu), which works since we've all so far been MIT students and alums. We mostly use it for static-ish data, though, not for coordination -- landlord's contact info, how to set up the printer, that kind of thing. Coordination is mostly over e-mail via MIT's mailing list infrastructure and zephyr/AIM/Jabber. (One of my housemates runs a Zephyr<->AIM gateway which we have set up on the house zephyr class so even the non-zephyr users among us have access to that channel.)
Projects I'm aware of in these spaces:
It's not specifically a SIPB project, but a few houses of SIPB cruft have put together Bluechips (http://github.com/ebroder/bluechips), which is a ledger setup for cohouses.
A friend has had good luck with Enemiesof Carlotta (http://liw.iki.fi/liw/eoc/index.html) as a non-MIT mailing list administration tool, though apparently it's not currently being maintained.
SIPB has been working on an open-source Doodle-killer they call Clockworks (http://sipb.mit.edu/projects/clockworks/), though I don't know what its current status is. I've not yet seen it in use anywhere.
bluedaisy and nakor use a DaVite (http://marginalhacks.com/Hacks/DaVite/) install for managing RSVPs, though it's also not currently maintained.
For my personal organization I use a combination of my mail client, Hiveminder for to-do lists, and Google Calendar for calendaring. Knowing obra, Hiveminder is a friend-run service, and I haven't yet run into anything that compelled me to switch off Google Calendar, though I think there are some similar host-your-own solutions out there. (GCal integrates nicely with my Android phone, and mostly I just haven't cared enough yet -- I'm just now moving off paper. :-) Except for e-mail, I don't really use those services to interact with anyone, though it's possible with both. In particular, sharing one's Google calendars seems like a boon to scheduling with other people.
Out of curiosity, what do you like about Salesforce that you don't find elsewhere/what did you find missing from Hiveminder? How are you using flat text files currently?
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regna
(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-23 10:40 pm (UTC)My house (http://asec.aperturehosting.net) uses a MediaWiki install hosted out of a SIPB AFS locker via Scripts (http://scripts.mit.edu), which works since we've all so far been MIT students and alums. We mostly use it for static-ish data, though, not for coordination -- landlord's contact info, how to set up the printer, that kind of thing. Coordination is mostly over e-mail via MIT's mailing list infrastructure and zephyr/AIM/Jabber. (One of my housemates runs a Zephyr<->AIM gateway which we have set up on the house zephyr class so even the non-zephyr users among us have access to that channel.)
Projects I'm aware of in these spaces:
For my personal organization I use a combination of my mail client, Hiveminder for to-do lists, and Google Calendar for calendaring. Knowing
Out of curiosity, what do you like about Salesforce that you don't find elsewhere/what did you find missing from Hiveminder? How are you using flat text files currently?