Zimbra bypassing OS's package system

[halfgaar]

Hi,

I want to start using Zimbra Open Source (on Debian), but I have a question regarding maintenance.

One package that I have experience with that installs outside the OS's package manager, is DirectAdmin. Maintaining that is a big pain, because it's not done with apt. This is especially true when there is a dist upgrade (from etch to lenny, for instance).

How does this work with Zimbra? There are two concerns:

1) When there is a new version of Zimbra, it just tells you to download the entire installer, right? Will that perform a clean upgrade of packages and not reset all kinds of settings? What if the upgrade is major (from 6 to 7, for instance). Will it be aware of version 6 to perform a clean upgrade?

2) When there is a new version of Debian, how is the upgrade done? Should I first upgrade Zimbra to a version that understands the new Debian and then upgrade Debian?

[phoenix]

I'll move this to the correct forum as it's not a Zimbra Desktop (which is where you posted it) question.

[bdial]

the upgrades for zimbra upgrade the software whilte maintaining all configuraiton. it will use the distribution's package manager but it won't require you to do anything other than run the install.sh and answer a couple of questions like if you want to verify the database integrity or things like that while upgrading.

[halfgaar]

Sorry for posting in the wrong forums, I guess I should have looked better.

@bdial
It uses the distro's package manager? I tried a test install, and everything goes into /opt. I'm pretty sure it doesn't use apt.

[phoenix]

Originally Posted by halfgaar

It uses the distro's package manager? I tried a test install, and everything goes into /opt. I'm pretty sure it doesn't use apt.

Pf course it uses apt to install the packages but it goes into a specific directory to avoid conflicts with any operating system packages, all the packages Zimbra needs will be in that directory except for a few specific packages/libraries.

[halfgaar]

Then why does my system have both exim and postfix installed. This is not possible under normal conditions, as it will suggest to uninstall exim when installing postfix.

[phoenix]

Originally Posted by halfgaar

Then why does my system have both exim and postfix installed. This is not possible under normal conditions, as it will suggest to uninstall exim when installing postfix.

That's because the package that's supplied with Zimbra (I assume that you're talking about Postfix in Zimbra) is added without any reference to packages in your operating system. No modifications are made to your operating system packages or dependencies by Zimbra, there is no problem installing Zimbra on your system - thousands of people do it (actually, a lot more than that ) and we don't have any problems. If you think it's going to be a problem to install and manage then stick with the packages supplied by Debian. Actually I might have made an error (I'm not too familiar with Debian or Ubuntu), the package is probably installed with dpkg not apt but I'll check that out. In any case, the rest of my comments still stand.

Just so you don't get too far down the 'install' road I'd suggest you look at the download page for the upcoming Zimbra 7.x release and check out your favourite distribution: Open Source Edition Downloads: Enterprise Messaging and Collaboration Software by Zimbra

[acesuares]

I just experienced that after
apt-get --purge remove postfix

the user (or group?) postdrop is removed too and zimbra breaks. This is on Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit with 6.08_2661.

Can anyone confirm that? I posted a bug.

[halfgaar]

Hmm, Version 7 had debian marked deprecated and there is no Ubuntu maverick support (version 10.10). And even 10.04 is beta for release 6. That leaves non of my favorite distro's...

Why is Debian 5 deprecated? In favor of Ubuntu of Debian 6?