Getting Ready for LiveArchive UI – What You Need to Know!
ExchangeDefender will be launching the LiveArchive Web UI during our webinar next week and we are looking forward to showing you how to launch it with a single command! In the meantime, this blog post is intended to give you a heads-up about the requirements and functionality so you can make design decisions.
Docker & Design
In a recent post, we discussed why MariaDB/RDS is required for the LiveArchive Web UI: it’s where we store the message metadata such as sender/recipient/subject/etc. These elements drive the UI and enable users to locate messages, search, and complete eDiscovery and email recovery tasks.
ExchangeDefender has organized the entire LiveArchive Web UI into a single container that can run on your own docker on a workstation or NAS in your office, across a wide variety of virtualization products and services, as well as public cloud like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. This makes ExchangeDefender Web UI easy to update, easy to manage, and easy to tweak to your requirements.
There are two ways to configure and start the container: preconfigured with environment variables or on-demand browser configuration. If you start the container without the environment defined you will be presented with a web configuration wizard that will prompt for S3 and RDS credentials. If this is the first time you’re deploying LiveArchive Web UI or just want to test it, this is the best way. Once you close your browser all the configuration vanishes and nobody else has access to your mail.
After you’ve configured everything to your liking and are looking to put the service into production, place the appropriate information in the container environment variables, and the container will always launch in production mode and bypass the wizard configuration.
Authentication
ExchangeDefender Web UI was designed to facilitate your email backup and eDiscovery needs. Our experience in compliance archiving and long-term email archiving has allowed us to work with countless organizations and one thing they all have in common is that they all have their own unique access and control needs.
ExchangeDefender Web UI by default presents all the available mailboxes and each email address has its own path. Using this predictable data storage process your Web Application Firewall can easily be configured to include or exclude data by path alone.
We designed the solution so it can be launched quickly, accessed, and managed without a lot of technical skill, and so it can be quickly modified/optimized for production. LiveArchive offers a lot of solutions to modern email problems and the flexibility means you can run different LiveArchive Web UI for different personnel or different tasks.
Resources & Customization
ExchangeDefender Web UI is completely free and open source. This means you can download it, modify it, and use it freely.
It also means that the solution will live even after ExchangeDefender as an organization is gone. You will not find any references or callbacks to our network and all the protocols are fully documented. This enables you to truly craft a failover email solution that can be completely disconnected from the Internet and placed into cold storage / safe.
Resource-wise the container is a little more than a web server and you can run hundreds of users with even the minimal 1 cpu / 1gb ram. This is possible because the SQL workload and data storage are handled by other services.
We hope you’re as excited about the launch as we are. Please join us for the webinar to see how it’s done and we’ll even help you set yours up right after the event! Just think of a good subdomain to point to your new LiveArchive backup platform.