7.1.4-NE ... undocumented behavior ?

[da1]

Hi guys,

I'm the master of one new and shinny Zimbra-NE-7.1.4 installed on a CentOS-6.2 amd64. For the moment, I'm using a trial license and I created 3 accounts and several domains (so far so good).

On another machine, for comparison purposes, I installed the Open Source edition of Zimbra and when I cam in this morning and logged into the admin web-i, I noticed that it was displaying the status of the second zimbra installation too (although, the other one is on a different IP, different machine); what gives ?


Problems (or things I was not expecting):
1) When removing users, the limit does not go down. A zimbra restart is necessary. Is this normal or maybe something I forgot to configure ?
2) The NE web-i is way slower (around 2 times) than the OpenSource web-I edition.

Any thoughts ?

[justdave]

I noticed that it was displaying the status of the second zimbra installation too (although, the other one is on a different IP, different machine); what gives ?

Did you point it at the first one's LDAP server when you installed it? If so, they're now part of a joint cluster, and the admin on either one will control both. Although how well that works in practice with one of them being NE and the other OSE, is way up in the air.

[da1]

Not according to "ldap_master_url" and "ldap_url". Both point to the local dns.

I've also noticed that zimbra is incredibly sensitive to the local hostname. For instance, if I change the hostname of the box (without changing /etc/hosts), the whole thing will go haywire and so far, the only fix is to reinstall zimbra.

Another thing is that, apparently, the local hostname entry in /etc/hosts is only needed @ install time and no more after that. ha ?

A bit too sensitive maybe ?

[justdave]

how about remote syslog? does one of them happen to be receiving syslog events from the other? I think that status page is actually grabbing the status messages from syslog, and it sets up all the remote servers to forward syslog events to the main server.

And yeah, you don't really need the stuff in /etc/hosts as long as your DNS works properly. Zimbra forces you to put it there as a failsafe, so Zimbra doesn't kill itself if your DNS goes down.

[da1]

I think that status page is actually grabbing the status messages from syslog, and it sets up all the remote servers to forward syslog events to the main server.

Not quite. For instance, "zmconfigd" is checked via netcat (not mentioned anywhere in the docs) and as long as you do not have it installed, you will get a red X under the status page (even if, in the logs, "zmconfigd" is mentioned as running). Checking the logs to see if a service is running or not is bad practice from my point of view because any bad programer can do a "echo 'running as $PID' >> $log" and in reality, the application is nowhere to be found (ex: can suffer a panic and it has no time to write in the logs that it crashed).

And yeah, you don't really need the stuff in /etc/hosts as long as your DNS works properly.

Unfortunately, I was not able to install zimbra via the "install.sh" script without an entry in /etc/hosts, even though my dns was working properly and I had all the necessary entries (A record and MX record).

Zimbra forces you to put it there as a failsafe, so Zimbra doesn't kill itself if your DNS goes down.

That sounds a bit odd.

[phoenix]

Not quite. For instance, "zmconfigd" is checked via netcat (not mentioned anywhere in the docs) ......

It is mentioned in the Release Notes (as well as the forums) and is a prerequisite from ZCS 7.1.3 onwards, it's also covered by bug 63195.

[da1]

For someone that has little experience with Zimbra and for someone that read that Zimbra is a package (a.k.a you get everyhting you need, just install and go) I would expect to have that prerequisite in the package or at least a point in the instalation process where the existence of netcat is evaluated. Similar to the check for libstdc++ and the other components.

Regardless, my initial questions still stand and I just hit another one:
I tried registering all our users (520) but when the 51st account was registering, I got an error that I exceeded the permitted accounts for this licence. All fine and good. Then I wanted to replace some of them (i.e: delete and create) so I deleted 10 and then started creating other 10. Surprise, surprise. The same error again. I was browsing the forums and I found out the one needs to restart zimbra for the account counter? to reinitialize. ha ? that's a bit weird.

[lytledd]

From my experience, after deleting an account, it takes a few minutes to register that the account has been purged. What that time limit is, I've never investigated.

Doug

[da1]

Interesting. I will try. Let's see what happenes.