how to start over without having to reinstall linux from scratch

[milprog]

Hi all

I would like to start over with zimbra installation on FC4 without "reformatting and starting from scratch". Is this possible? I tried to deinstall all RPMs using "rpm -e `rpm -qa | grep zimbra`", delete the "zimbra" user and remove its home directory (/opt/zimbra), but obviously this is not enough. When I try to reinstall, the command "su - zimbra" gives me the error message "could not open session". Odd enough, when I rename the user name "zimbra" to something else using vipw, the su command works again. Cleaning up with visudo does not help either.

Is there a way to remove a zimbra installation and start over without reinstalling everything (including linux) from scratch?

Regards
--Marcel

[marcmac]

install.sh -u removes the installation, but it sounds like you've got other problems. Not sure where su - zimbra is returning the error (at what point does that happen?)

[DanielP]

Hi,

At least on a troublesome SLES9 installation, install.sh -u dont remove everything.

I did this:
/etc/init.d/zimbra stop
install.sh -u
killall running processes owned by "zimbra"
cd /etc
grep -r zimbra *
Remove everything that contains zimbra(init script, entrys in passwd files, group files etc)
rm -rf /opt/zimbra
rm -rf /var/log/zimbra*
locate zimbra
remove any found files
(should be clean by now)
restart syslogd,crond
lsof|grep zimbra (should be clean by now)
last two steps can be solwed by reboot aswell

After this it should be clean and ready for "fresh" install. I had to do this beacuse some other errors. But this should atleast remove everything.

/Daniel

[milprog]

I finally found the problem. The installation adds the lines

zimbra soft nofile 10000
zimbra hard nofile 10000

to /etc/security/limits.conf. This caused my problems. After removing these two lines su - zimbra now works again.

The consequence of this problem was that the setup perl script's runAsZimbra() could not run properly. Perhaps a sudo -u zimbra would be more appropriate (however, this does not do exacty the same thing as su - zimbra).

I know I'm probably trying something difficult: I want to install zimbra into a linux VServer running on a FC4-x86_64 box. Either I will have to add some capabilities to my VServer (which is very restricted now) or tweak a few things. Using a VServer would make Zimbra more affordable for small installations (which is my case).

Thanks again for your help
Regards
--Marcel