Clone multi zimbra environment and hostname change

[su_A_ve]

Hello,

We are currently running zimbra 5.0.21 under RHEL4. In order to test OS upgrade and eventually version upgrade, we need to clone it. Therefore we want to 'clone' our environment however we do need to change the corresponding hostnames. Note that it is a dev environment - we need to clone it into a test environment.

For example, we have mail1-dev.domain.net and mail2-dev.domain.net and want to clone them to mail1-test.domain.net and mail2-test.domain.net

Both run all services with the exception that mail1 is the master ldap and logger, while mail2 is the slave ldap and does not run logger.

I first attempted to change the names in the existing dev environment using the zmsetservername command (and adding the new entries on /etc/hosts) I first changed mail1 (master ldap), and seemed to work ok, however when I changed mail2 it could not connect to the master ldap. I tried to do it backwards (slave ldap first) but didn't work either. So I rolled back from backups.

What's the best approach here?

Thanks in advance.

[su_A_ve]

Bump?

Cause support has not responded back in over a week. I was hoping that someone here could help. I can't be the only one that ever thought about doing this...

TIA

[gruad23]

Ok. I clone our zimbra here every night and do the hostname-change, but its a standalone-zimbra and does not have any ldap-master-slave relations involved. So I'm not sure if my input here applies to your problems. But as it seems you didnt get any other respond maybe my approach can give you some ideas.

cloning zimbraA --> zimbraB

1) The cloning is pretty easy. I clone with rsync when zimbraA is running and then I stop the zimbra and rsync again. (This saves on zimbraA-downtime)
Of course zimbraB is stopped during this whole process.

2) MOST IMPORTANT: on zimbraB I now block every network-traffic to zimbraA, so the next step will not mess up zimbraA. I do this by simple changing /etc/hosts temporarily so zimbraA points to zimbraB when looking from zimbraB. Cause in the next step we'll change the hostnames and while doing so zimbraB is partially still thinking its zimbraA and it has all passwords for zimbraA and its IP-adress and will change the hostname in zimbraA-LDAP if you dont redirect it. I've been there and had to rollback from backup

3) start zimbraB and change the hostname: /opt/zimbra/libexec/zmsetservername -n zimbraB.mydomain.com

4) finally fire up zimbraB and fine you are


I just wrote a script that will do all the stuff. Execution of commands on the other server is done via ssh and there are a lot of tests involved so the scripts always checks if traffic is really blocked from B to A.

a more detailed description can be found at my zimbra-page at:
knowwiki:basics:zimbra

hope this is of any need to you. But I think this modifying of the hosts-file might proove useful in your master-slave-ldap-setup too when you think things through and picture which zimbra needs to connect where & when.

good luck,
p

[su_A_ve]

That's pretty much what I'm doing, however what I understood was to have zimbra down when doing the zmsetservername.

The command does actually start ldap and attempts to make the change there, pointing to the ldap master. When I tried doing this, and doing the ldap master first, it seemed to work fine, however when I did the slave, it failed as it couldn't connect to the master.

I did had /etc/hosts changed pointing to the new IPs but didn't make a difference.

Waiting for a proper answer from support - after a week I've gotten nowhere with them. Don't know why we pay for it...

[su_A_ve]

Not sure if anyone is looking at this...

Getting a little further after trying to change the master first and the slave second (no help from support still) but some things still have references to the old names. For example:

zimbraBackupReportEmailRecipients: admin@oldslaveserver
zimbraBackupReportEmailSender: admin@oldslaveserver

And the certificates of for the old names of course...

zmlocalconfig on the master shows:
av_notify_domain = oldmasterserver

zmlocalconfig on the slave shows:
av_notify_domain = oldslaveserver
ldap_host = oldmasterserver
ldap_master_url = ldap://oldmasterserver:389
ldap_url = ldap://oldslaveserver:389 ldap://oldmasterserver.rider.edu:389