Zimbra for dummies?

[KLGNT]

I mentioned in another post that I have inherited a Zimbra system. I'm struggling to quickly get up to speed on it. I have the full manual printed out, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of information on getting at the low level guts of some things.

So, I've come up with a few questions about things I can't yet find answers for.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

• How can you make Zimbra dump the user info to a file or the console? I need to get a list of address, user, password out of it so I can keep this info in our admin database.
  
• Can/should you update the individual applications that make up Zimbra? For example, our ClamAV is quite old.
  
• Where is the LDAP info stored? Can I use it externally? That is, what config file has the LDAP domain and password in it, and can I use that to allow other systems to use the database (for example, our Xerox WorkCentres). Or, conversely, can you make Zimbra use an external LDAP server?
  
• Is rsyncing the /opt/zimbra tree really the preferred way to backup?
  
• Where can I find info on what regular Zimbra maintenance should consist of, and how to perform it?
  
• Where is there more info on how multiple, integrated Zimbra servers interact and how to administer this interaction?

I think that's it for now. Sorry for the deluge, but I'm sure most of us have had systems handed to them that they haven't used before and didn't setup themselves so hopefully you can empathize with my situation.

Thanks in advance.

[p24t]

My slapd.conf is at /opt/zimbra/openldap/etc/openldap/slapd.conf - You should be able to get all your user info from there. You're not going to get anyone's password from Zimbra, or LDAP I'm sure.

There are ways to update things, especially ClamAV. I remember seeing something about that in the forums. Unless there's a security issue with one of the other components, I wouldn't want to upgrade them separately.

You can use Zimbra as a normal LDAP server for some things. There's ways to use it for authentication for POSIX, Samba, etc. I haven't played with those myself.

If you back up the entire /opt/zimbra you'll get everything. rsync is a great way to do something like that, though I haven't done it.

As for the cluster info, are you looking to expand your system for current or future capacity? I haven't tried any clustering yet myself.

[KLGNT]

My slapd.conf is at /opt/zimbra/openldap/etc/openldap/slapd.conf - You should be able to get all your user info from there. You're not going to get anyone's password from Zimbra, or LDAP I'm sure.

I'll look, though I'd love to find out how to dump all the info. Otherwise, I have to make a new password, and go update each user's Outlook. Ughh.
(We basically use Zimbra as a fancy POP3/SMTP server now. Not using the web interface or desktop client...yet.

There are ways to update things, especially ClamAV. I remember seeing something about that in the forums. Unless there's a security issue with one of the other components, I wouldn't want to upgrade them separately.

Yeah, I figured, I've been searching the forums, but haven't found everything yet. I'm posted this list just hoping people would even post links to existing answers in the forums that I haven't been able to find yet.

You can use Zimbra as a normal LDAP server for some things. There's ways to use it for authentication for POSIX, Samba, etc. I haven't played with those myself.

Basically I want to use it in a few ways.
- To let the Xerox WorkCentre machines pull address lookups.
- To let e-mail clients use and maybe update the address book
- To sync with domain logons

If you back up the entire /opt/zimbra you'll get everything. rsync is a great way to do something like that, though I haven't done it.

OK, I thought so, it just seemed like a brute force method and I thought there might be a more preferred, or more elegant method.

As for the cluster info, are you looking to expand your system for current or future capacity? I haven't tried any clustering yet myself.

Yeah, there are two systems that are clustered. This is the main root of my upgrade nightmares.

Thanks for the feedback, this is a start.

[dljordaneku]

You can use Zimbra as a normal LDAP server for some things. There's ways to use it for authentication for POSIX, Samba, etc. I haven't played with those myself.

We are currently running v4.5.7 so we don't have the built in IM yet. I am running a Openfire server and have it authentic against the Zimbra LDAP.

dj

[stock99]

We have an xerox print station too. Is there an easy way to let it access the GAL?

[Bill Brock]

For backing up the whole Zimbra server, I have a second HD (SATA, the main drive is SCSI) that I use the "cp" command with the "-rp" switches. This perserves the ownership. Backing up to an external drive will not perserve the ownership.

[KLGNT]

I'm working things out for now.
For example, backups. I bought a Drobo and 1.5TB of drives for it and I'm using it for backups for now.
I started with a manual backup and copy, but I'm going to use that as a basis for future automated rsync backups.
The Drobo's are nice BTW, though I'd recommend anyone looking at using one with Linux look into the Drobo Share addon to make for easy use with Linux.
I'm still hoping they'll come out with firmware to support Linux filesystems natively, however for now I'm managing.
I installed NTFS3G under FUSE and I formatted the Drobo as NTFS on an XP box. Now I can mount and write to it from the Linux server fine. Though preserving Linux file attributes is an issue. But for storing a lot of things that are .tar.bz2, it works great.

Well, I'm still trying to figure out how I'm going to upgrade my Zimbra install in two locations at once without downtime.... Dunno what I'm going to do, though I'm thinking that somehow VMWare or other virtualization will be involved.

[KLGNT]

Stock99,

I have to say, I'm not too impressed with the Xerox WorkCentre systems.
We have a bunch of them and they seem like a great system on paper. However, in reality there are some issues.

- Many of the features that are what sell these systems are barely usable and not fully implemented. They are teasers to get you interested in the idea of that feature. However to use it fully, most of them require some additional purchase from Xerox in software, hardware or both. It's very Microsoft like in that to do all the magic they are marketing, you need a lot of Xerox hardware and software in an all Xerox document management network.

- The units support FAX machine functions and work well as FAX machines, BUT, they have NO option to power back up after a power failure (like most PC's can) so if you live in the real world where power blips and failures happen, your FAX machine can be off all night or all weekend if a power failure occurrs. Sure a UPS is an option, but no one at Xerox can give you specs on power consumption. You have to use an inline watt meter and convert to Volt/Amps to size your UPS. Be prepared, it will be a big one.

- The units are not up to use in non-office environments. What I mean it that if you have a fancy, filtered, humidified air, sealed office building, no problem. But if you are somewhere that's dry, or dirty, or dusty (you know, Earth), then they have problems.

- Inconsistent user interface, options, and capabilities across the same family of machines. For example, our cheaper WCP 5638 can scan and create searchable PDF's (eg it has OCR). Our much more expensive C3545 can only create non-searchable PDF's. And some of the models can't send e-mail if your mail server requires SMTP login (ie all them that aren't wanna-be SPAM relays)

On the other hand, I'd love to get them to at least share LDAP info with Zimbra, it would unlock a whackload of cool features.

[ArcaneMagus]

* How can you make Zimbra dump the user info to a file or the console? I need to get a list of address, user, password out of it so I can keep this info in our admin database.

zmprov gaa

When run as the Zimbra user on the server this will output a list of all email accounts on your server. In Zimbra the email address IS the user account. I believe the passwords are stored encrypted so good luck with trying to grab them in a readable form for storing elsewhere...

* Can/should you update the individual applications that make up Zimbra? For example, our ClamAV is quite old.

It is generally a good idea to update Zimbra itself as there are some customizations done to the standard products that make up the core of Zimbra to get it to preform the way it does. There are some cases like ClamAV where you can upgrade the individual components if you so desire but generally the latest Zimbra version is either the latest released or very close to it. The ClamAV integrated into the latest released version of Zimbra (5.0.4) is 0.92.1...which is the latest one available. So in your case it looks like you actually need to preform an upgrade of your Zimbra server. If that is not an option you might want to look at Updating CLAMAV - Zimbra :: Wiki

* Where is the LDAP info stored? Can I use it externally? That is, what config file has the LDAP domain and password in it, and can I use that to allow other systems to use the database (for example, our Xerox WorkCentres). Or, conversely, can you make Zimbra use an external LDAP server?

For LDAP issues have you looked at LDAP - Zimbra :: Wiki?

* Is rsyncing the /opt/zimbra tree really the preferred way to backup?

For backup procedures you might want to look into Open Source Edition Backup Procedure - Zimbra :: Wiki
The setup that we are using is based on LVM. The script is available on the Wiki page. Basically the Zimbra services are shut down-> A snapshot of the current state of the disk is taken-> The Zimbra services are then started back up while the backup then proceeds to work on the snapshot of the disk from when the server was down. On our server the entire downtime for the system is about 1.5 minutes even though the backup can take anywhere from 30min to a few hours. Although this isn't quite as nice as the NE backup it has worked so far for us.

If you are running the Network Edition of Zimbra though then there is from what I hear a nice backup solution built into the server. See Network Edition Backup Procedure - Zimbra :: Wiki for how it worked in the 4.0 servers.

* Where can I find info on what regular Zimbra maintenance should consist of, and how to perform it?

From the experience that I have had so far the only "maintenance" needed on a Zimbra server is in making sure that your disk space doesn't run out (user quotas should handle that though...) and dealing with the deferred queue every once in a while to deal with users that do silly things like try to send to addresses like asdf@asd.0rg not .org....Other than that you might want to take an active role in the anti-spam measures built in (spamassasin) or you can just let the automatic training take care of that if you so desire.