Houston, Tranquility Base here, the E-Mail has landed »
PHILIPSTORRY - JAN 14, 2010 (12:47:37 PM)
Here's an interesting article on using Outlook from orbit.
In a nutshell, they build an OST for Outlook on the ground, copy it up to a fileshare on the Shuttle, where the astronauts then use it to handle their email. The saved OST (presumably with mail in an Outbox) is then copied down and handled elsewhere.
In one sense, this is a wonderful hack. A glorious kludge that gets people their email in adverse conditions.
In another, this is ludicrous. It's forcing Outlook to do things it was never designed to do, and has all kinds of issues because of this.
Frankly, I can think of better ways of working remotely. Naturally, my first suggestion would be Notes - just replicate, baby!
But then, there may be latency issues - which would mean that the fewer actual TCP requests, the better.
Replication may be efficient, but there are many small requests in there, so high latency would suck. Given the potential for loss of signal too, replication is probably better than POP3/IMAP over the link, but not as good as a file copy - because if you copy one big file, then just about every packet in the send/recieve is nice and full.
(Even copying many small files via rsync/robocopy will generate many small findfirst/findnext requests to the filesystems, so is probably not good.)
Given that's the case, set up a little SMTP/POP3 server. Connect Outlook to that, and work locally within the Shuttle. Then you can sync with the ground by using tar/gzip on the POP3 server files and the SMTP server queues. It'll likely transfer a lot more data in a much smaller file than an OST, too.
Aw, heck. There are loads of ways to do this. After all, UUCP and FidoNet had this licked years ago in the days when everyone used text consoles, and graphical interfaces were a pipedream.
But copying an OST - well, it smacks of the kind of rush project that everyone dreads, the "temporary fix" that becomes permanent.
NASA IT - not somewhere I'd like to do messaging right now!
