why is binding to a single IP so difficult?

[gruad23]

I just upgraded zimbra from 6 to 7.0.1, but there is still this old problem of mine:

how do I bin zimbra to a single IP-adress? my server has 4 ip-adresses and I really would like to bind to only one of them, so I could use the other ip-adresses for other services like:

* apache-webserver
* mailserver for different things
* mysql-server

imho it would be so easy to implement in zimbra and I dont get it, why its not done. Many people on the web gives many howtos how it can be done, so there seems to be need for this feature. Most solutions only covers certain services or will not survive an zimbra-update.

I use zimbra zcs which means I dont pay for zimbra. So I'm not complaining. I just dream that someone would bring up a simple solution for this. Zimbra ZCS is great. It allows non-profit-groups to run high-end webservers.

thnx,
p

[LMStone]

It sounds like your physical server is powerful enough that it can run a number of other applications in addition to Zimbra, yes?

In our experience however, Zimbra is really an "appliance"; we just get to choose the operating system. Installing additional applications on the Zimbra server, especially additional instances of other applications Zimbra already includes (e.g. MySQL) is not straightforward. Plus, all the Zimbra scripts presume they have full run of the server.

Your case is a good candidate for virtualization however. You could for example:

Run Zimbra in one virtual machine and create a second virtual machine to run all of the other applications you need. Allocate just the one IP address to the Zimbra vm and the other three to the second vm.

Hope that helps,
Mark

[Krishopper]

+1 for Mark's response.

[gruad23]

thnx mark ... this is what we do now. run zimbra as virtual server on a potent host. first we tried vmware-server but we had lots of troubles with it (sorry to say here, but vmware-server kept crashing and crashing) and now we have vbox which works better, but I still feel that zimbra is kind of slow sometimes.

So we decided to move zimbra to a second server and use the same server as backupserver for our other services.

I still have the impression that virtualization is for easy deployment and maintainance but takes more resources than when installing the services on the same machine along each other.

Services like the one used on a LAMP-server or with zimbra can be installed many times without problems if people know what they are doing, so I dont think it would be difficult to alter zimbra to bind to only one IP-adress. Zimbra already does a similar thing by installing itself completely inside /opt/zimbra - including all sockets and logs (except the mainlog /var/log/zimbra)

p

[LMStone]

Originally Posted by gruad23

thnx mark ... this is what we do now. run zimbra as virtual server on a potent host. first we tried vmware-server but we had lots of troubles with it (sorry to say here, but vmware-server kept crashing and crashing) and now we have vbox which works better, but I still feel that zimbra is kind of slow sometimes.

So we decided to move zimbra to a second server and use the same server as backupserver for our other services.

I still have the impression that virtualization is for easy deployment and maintainance but takes more resources than when installing the services on the same machine along each other.

Services like the one used on a LAMP-server or with zimbra can be installed many times without problems if people know what they are doing, so I dont think it would be difficult to alter zimbra to bind to only one IP-adress. Zimbra already does a similar thing by installing itself completely inside /opt/zimbra - including all sockets and logs (except the mainlog /var/log/zimbra)

p

We have found the free ESXi product to be yards ahead of VMware Server. VMware Server runs on top of an existing Linux installation, whereas ESXi is its own operating system. The 3.5 version (old, but still available), will run on older 32-bit hardware, and the latest 4 version is very stable and fast on true 64-bit hardware.

Hope that helps,
Mark