Proxy Question

[Chewie71]

We have 5 mailstores. If a user hits any one of the mailstores they get redirected to the correct server.

Now.....we want to start testing ZImbra Proxy so that we can give the users one address to log in to....and it will hide the physical server names that their account sits on. They will never notice the redirection anymore.

Is it possible to enable Proxy and test this implementation in the live environement or will it break the way it currently works? I've been looking at some of the documentation and forum postings about it....and it looks like port numbers have to change on the mailstores? Is that true? Will mobile users and users with "thick" clients have to reconfigure their IMAP/Zimbra Mobile settings?

What's the best way to roll this out so I can test it before going live to everyone?

I have a new server setup and ready to go for running proxy....just am not ready to implement if it's going to break something when I turn it on.

Thanks,
Matt

[Klug]

Is it possible to enable Proxy and test this implementation in the live environement or will it break the way it currently works?

You can't...

Because when you setup the proxy server "in front of" some mailboxes servers, you need to set things on these mailboxes severs...
You need to setup "zimbraMailReferMode" to "reverse-proxied" and tiny other things...

What's the best way to roll this out so I can test it before going live to everyone?

What I did and recommend anyone to do (because we lack precise documentation on zimbra-proxy and the zmproxyinit tool changes at each upgrade) is to setup a "test infrastructure" next to the production one.

With a couple of VMs (with LDAP/MTA/mailstores on them, it's just for test) and one that'll run the proxy you're OK to test...
Then you'll see what you need to do on the proxy VM and the changes needed on the mailboxes VM. That'll give you a "setup scenario".

Once you've tried and played, erase all VM (mailboxes and proxy) and play your scenario it again (I'm happy I did this because of some issues with the tools in 5.0.8).

Then once everything is OK and double-checked, you can add your proxy and setup your production mailboxes servers.

You'll need to setup the http port of the mailboxes servers to 8080 (in with zmtlsctl in http or https or both mode but not mixed), communication between the proxy and the mailboxes servers won't be "clear" (known limitation).