14 December 2003: SME/Alpha V5.5 is based on Mitel's SME 5.5, which was silently end-of-lifed in September 2003, and Red Hat Linux 7.2, which will be end-of-lifed on 31 December 2003. It is as yet unclear whether or not there will continue to be GPL'ed sources of security backports for RHL 7.2 after 31 Dec 2003. As a result, I cannot recommend that anyone continue to use SME/Alpha V5.5 and urge all users to explore alternatives.
This page is about SME/Alpha, an unofficial and unsupported port of Mitel Networks' "SME Server" Linux distribution to the Alpha (aka DEC Alpha, Digital Alpha, Compaq Alpha, AXP) architecture. The SME Server is a Linux distribution targeted at small and medium sized enterprises, providing an internet gateway and a host of LAN, WAN, and internet services. It comes in supported and unsupported flavors. The unsupported flavor is released under a license that allows redistribution. SME/Alpha is based on this unsupported -or developer- release. For more information about the Mitel Networks SME Server distribution, please visit www.e-smith.org (e-smith being the former name of SME Linux).
The latest release of SME/Alpha is SME/Alpha V5.5. It is based on SME
Server V5.5 with all updates applied. There are a few differences in
package versions between Mitel's SME Server V5.5 and SME/Alpha V5.5
because of Red Hat errata updates and some Alpha-specific bugfixes.
The only real difference from a server administrator's perspective between
the original release for the x86 architecture and SME/Alpha V5.5 is, or
should be, that the original x86 release uses mailfront as its smtp
frontend, while SME/Alpha uses obtuse-smtpd. This should be the only
difference on an operational level, but there is another real difference
in the amount of testing that the original x86 release and SME/Alpha have
been subjected to. I've tried to be thorough in my testing, and have
received invaluable assistance and bug reports from Chaloner Hale, but the
x86 release has many more users and many more testers, and as a result is
much more thoroughly tested than SME/Alpha.
SME/Alpha is not released by Mitel, nor do they provide support for it. If
you find a bug in SME/Alpha, please report it to me.
SME/Alpha is distributed as a CDROM image file. This is a single file
representing a standard CDROM or ISO 9660 filesystem. Most CD writing
software can handle these CDROM images, but you will likely need to
specify that the input file is a CDROM image and that you want to "make a
CDROM from an image", or whatever it's called in your software. Because of
the fact that a CDROM image contains an entire CDROM in a single file,
these image files are usually very large. The image for the SME/Alpha v5.5
installation CDROM weighs in at 372 MB. If you don't have the bandwidth to
download the image, you can send me an
email to request a CDROM.
In addition to the image file, you should also download the md5sum for the
image file. This can be thought of as a unique signature for the image
file. After you've downloaded the CDROM image, you should run a program to
calculate the image's md5sum and compare it to the md5sum that you
downloaded. This is to verify the integrity of the image file. On Unices
the program to calculate md5sums is 'md5sum'. There are freeware md5sum
programs for DOS as well.
This is what you need to do to get started with SME/Alpha V5.5:
I will post updates to packages in SME/Alpha on the errata page.
If you have any questions about SME/Alpha, don't hesitate to email me. If it's a good question and I know the answer, I'll put it in the FAQ list.