Removing Users from GAL

[blittleboy]

Hi all,

I work as a Network Administrator in a school and am currently having a few issues surrounding our Zimbra install.

Every person in the school, including all staff and students, is assigned an email address through our Zimbra server. The staff are now being migrated over onto using Zimbra as their web-based email client.

We are however having the issue where when admin staff are sending out important, confidential information, some are mis-typing and we are worried that at some point these emails are going to be sent to a student - who also appear on the GAL.

The GAL is, of course, useful for staff wishing to contact other members of staff. However, is there a way of removing the students from the gal so that they do not appear?

Thanks a lot,

Ben

[bdial]

in an account's properties there is a "hide in gal" option. I think you can set this per CoS too. So you could have a student cos and a faculty cos. the student cos would have "hide in gal" applied to it so anyone in that cos would inherit the property.

[blittleboy]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply - I liked the idea of using the CoS to manage it and looked into it, but can't seem to find anything in the cos options in order to hide the account from appearing in the GAL.

Any ideas where this might be?

[bdial]

hrm you're right it doesn't seem to be an option under cos, you'd have to set it per account.

[blittleboy]

surely there's got to be a quicker/better way of doing this - otherwise i've got 1500 accounts to edit!! please help someone!

[bdial]

you could script it, but you'd need to have all the students in their own cos or distribution already, or some kind of attribute you could search and have a list of users to feed to a batch command.Do you haev something like that??

[blittleboy]

all students are in a cos called 'students' and all staff in a cos called 'staff'. this is done automatically through LDAP so they should all be in the right CoS' - so yes, i have that.

[bdial]

Ok here goes. If you're not comfortable with command line scripting you shouldn't try this.

First you need to get the id of your 'students' cos.

/opt/zimbra/bin/zmprov gc students | grep zimbraId

this should return the ID which will look like this 8c2168da-e087-4ea9-a996-aa72f57bd478

Next execute this command

zmprov gaa -v | grep -e uid: -e zimbraCOSId | grep -B1 8c2168da-e087-4ea9-a996-aa72f57bd478 | grep uid: | awk '{print $2}' > students.txt

That may take a while to run since you have a lot of users. It will leave you with a students.txt file which should have all the students in it. verify by visual inspection maybe

Now finally

for i in `cat students.txt`
do
/opt/zimbra/bin/zmprov ma $i zimbraHideInGal TRUE
done

that should work

[blittleboy]

thanks for that - will give it a go. am i right in thinking that this will just update the 'hide in gal' attribute to all of the individual accounts in the CoS, rather than change the CoS - so that next time i add an account I will have to run the command again?

[uxbod]

Please vote for Bug 33874 - RFE: zimbraHideInGal exposed via CoS