Test backup restoration problem

[richard-hdd]

Hello,

I am trying to restore a backup we have of our Zimbra installation to a test server just so that I can see that I can actually restore a backup. Before I start explaining my problems, here are the configurations involved:

Current mail server is running Release 4.5.10_GA_1575.RHEL4_20071117152457 CentOS4 FOSS edition and is running on CentOS release 4.5 (Final).

The test server that I am trying to restore the backup to is running Release 4.5.10_GA_1575.RHEL4_20071117152457 CentOS4 FOSS edition and is running on CentOS release 4.6 (Final).

To backup Zimbra on our mail server, I shutdown Zimbra and then rsync the /opt/zimbra directory and all of it's contents to our backup server and then start Zimbra back up. My understanding is that in order to restore Zimbra on another server, I need restore the /opt/zimbra directory and run the install program for the exact same version of the original installed Zimbra (which I have done).

The first time I did this I had lots of errors during the install process due to DNS. I originally gave the test server a hostname of mailbackup but I didn't add the information to the DNS cause I didn't actually want to act as a mail server. I tried different suggestions from the forums but couldn't really resolve any of the problems.

I started over again with a fresh virtual machine and this time I gave it a hostname of localhost. This seemed to have solved most of the problems as I was able to get through the install with only a couple of warnings about MX entries not being found.

However this time when I start Zimbra on the test server, I get the following:

[root@localhost libexec]# su - zimbra
[zimbra@localhost ~]$ zmcontrol stop
Host localhost
Stopping stats...Done
Stopping mta...Done
Stopping spell...Done
Stopping snmp...Done
Stopping antivirus...Done
Stopping antispam...Done
Stopping imapproxy...Done
Stopping mailbox...Done
Stopping logger...Done
Stopping ldap...Done

but when I check the status I get:

Host localhost
antispam Running
antivirus Running
ldap Running
logger Running
mailbox Stopped
mysql.server is not running
tomcat is not running
mta Running
snmp Running
spell Running
stats Stopped

I tried stopping zimbra, running /opt/zimbra/libexec/zmfixperms as root and then starting zimbra again but that didn't seem to change anything.

Is the problem with restore a Zimbra backup to another server is that the hostname is not the same as what was on the original server? If so, is it possible to test a backup restoration without disrupting mail services on the actual mail server?

Any help on resolving this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

[phoenix]

Details in this blog entry: http://www.zimbra.com/blog/archives/...er_server.html There are also some articles in the wiki and lots of threads in the forums about backup/restore.

[preem]

When i tried the mentioned procedure, it went flawlessly, the only thing needed changing was the zimbra UID/GID, other than that, it worked great, so you might wanna check it out.