Installation problem Zimbra 5.0.2 on Ubuntu 7.10 Server Gutsy

[hjmangalam]

You may want to be careful about this. I'm one of the zimbra outlaws running 5.0.2 (well, I was) on Ubuntu 7.10 fairly happily and decided, just before a presentation to try to see if 5.0.5 fixed some of the oddities I had run into. I used dijichi2's fixes to address the problems I was having with the install.sh and while it worked great to trick the installer, it ended poorly with what I can only see as a completely buggered installation. Luckily it was only my mail that got fried. I did back up the mail data, but didn't move the backup out of the /opt/zimbra dir. (the point of a backup dir is that it's not in danger of being fried, no?) So while my mail dir appears to be intact (and now is backed up elsewhere), the /opt/zimbra dir is fragged. No more backup dir, no more ldap config, too many files missing to upgrade according to the install.sh file.

I'm not using ldap for anything, but I guess that zimbra does and it's not happy that it can't find the config file. got the error:

ldap_url and ldap_master_url cannot be the same on an ldap replica

Trying to remember from memory what other errors I saw:

Error: assertion '-r /opt/zimbra/conf/my.cnf' failed

when trying to verify the database - hung there for a while and then that part of it failed.

I can't blame this on Zimbra - they have their own Q&A to work on and I tricked the install.sh, but it seems odd that the backup dir would be susceptible to an upgrade failure under any situation. Isn't that the point?

I guess I'll have to just give up on this install and do a fresh one, altho if the zimbra people want to advise on whether it's possible to recover the 5000+ messages from the zimbra data dir, I'd be interested. Altho I seem to remember that the schema changed between then and now.

Seems that it might be a good idea to stress backing up not only the mail data but also the entire /opt/zimbra tree before trying any funny stuff.

Hope someone benefits from my pain...
I'll be dredging out my GENUINE 6.06 release for any production test.

hjm

To follow up my own post on some oddities - again, this is an outlaw installation of 5.0.5 on Ubuntu 7.10.

A complete reinstallation of 5.0.5 brought back a working zimbra installation, and also cured some of the problems I had before:

-

• the unable to upload certain file types problem was solved!
• the oddly misnamed sharing of folders when you could really only share files problem was fixed and the interface text explained it better.
• some interface glitches or textual inaccuracies were fixed.
• subjectively, it seems to be faster than 5.0.2

However, in pushing it a bit further, I was interested in getting the Archiving and Discovery to work as this is a critical thing for our org and in reading the docs on it, I (think) I was mistaken in having to install the xmbxsearch admin extension (I think it's included by default in 5.0.5).

On a sparkiling fresh install of 5.0.5, which otherwise worked very well, I added the extension with:

zmzimletctl deploy zimlets-network/zimbra_xmbxsearch.zip

When this completed & I stopped and restarted zimbra, while the user pages would allow login/logout and a normal interaction, the admin console would not allow a normal login. This has been seen before in a number of versions, but I have not been able to glean why. Adding the debug flag gave some additional info:

Loaded domainadmin.js
domainadmin.js is modifying ZaSettings
Loaded com_zimbra_license.js
Modify ZaGlobalConfig XModel
Adding function to modify GlobalConfig XForm

But essentially the admin console just seems to lock in stage before offering the login/password pane with the hopeful but ultimately futile message: [Loading...]

Since it was a fresh re-install and I had little to lose, I re-installed the whole system again (upgrading, not forcing an overwrite), but the problem persisted.

The odd thing is that if I restart firefox (2.0.0.14 on Linux), the admin console will load correctly, apparently obtaining credentials from the cache.
Konqueror doesn't work at all, even trying to fake itself as firefox.
Opera surprisingly presents the login screen (I suspect b/c I've never logged into zimbra on it, but then locks up in the same place.
Amazingly, galeon works! I've never used it before, but it was able to log in and the full console is visible (if ugly due to font mis-mapping).
So this seems possibly to be a problem with firefox? Strange that it never happened before.
Let me know if I can supply logs to help debug it.

hjm

[dwmtractor]

Originally Posted by hjmangalam

I did back up the mail data, but didn't move the backup out of the /opt/zimbra dir. (the point of a backup dir is that it's not in danger of being fried, no?)

You didn't mention whether you are using NE or FOSS, but if you're using FOSS there is no Zimbra-defined backup directory. Whatever method you use, it goes where you send it.

Originally Posted by hjmangalam

Seems that it might be a good idea to stress backing up not only the mail data but also the entire /opt/zimbra tree before trying any funny stuff.

Uhhh. . .YEAH!!!! I don't mean to be flip here, but most threads on this forum recommend that you do some form of backup of the entire /opt/zimbra tree before ANY upgrade.

[hjmangalam]

I'm using the NE eval'ing for a fairly serious group and expecting to pay for a bit more data security than "back up our backups" . It's always good advice and yes, I will certainly do so if we decide to buy in. That option should probably be part of the upgrade script, if a zimbra employee and the consensus of experienced users indicate that it should be done, no?

So far, zimbra does seem to be a good fit and I really like the way the system is moving, but the complexity and amount of time it's taken to become even marginally comfortable with the gotchas and "lore of the zimbra way" is a bit disconcerting. However, I realize I'm reporting an unsupported installation so I'm grateful that you're talking to me at all.

Tomorrow, it goes on a ubuntu 606 server.
hjm

[phoenix]

Originally Posted by hjmangalam

I'm using the NE eval'ing for a fairly serious group and expecting to pay for a bit more data security than "back up our backups" .

You really need to install Zimbra NE on a supported platform, the currently supported version is 6.06 LTS - support is not provided for other releases at this time.

[dwmtractor]

Originally Posted by hjmangalam

I'm using the NE eval'ing for a fairly serious group and expecting to pay for a bit more data security than "back up our backups" . It's always good advice and yes, I will certainly do so if we decide to buy in. That option should probably be part of the upgrade script, if a zimbra employee and the consensus of experienced users indicate that it should be done, no?

Reasonable question, but given the wide variety of hardware on which our users set up their systems, it could be a real "gotcha." All we would need would be for someone to fire off such a script on a machine that didn't have enough hdd space on whatever partition was coded into the script, and the whole thing goes kaflooey.

A warning in the script, something to the effect of "Attention, we strongly recommend you back up /opt/zimbra in its entirety before continuing. . .don't come crying to us if you don't" might get some traction, but who really reads warnings, ya know?

I think you'll find the "gotchas" are a lot fewer when you install on a fully-supported OS, which is all the NE sales will countenance anyhow.

[dijichi2]

Sorry you had problems. Couple of things:

1) To try and restore your fried data, try installling from scratch (taking a tar backup first). Often you will end up with a good working install.

2) Always, always, always, always take a tar backup of /opt/zimbra while zimbra is shut down before an upgrade. I release this is very inconvenient, especially if it's for a 24x7 system. Downtime can be minimized if you use rsync, do a main rsync while running then do a final rsync after bringing down the system.

3) You tried my long ugly hack on a NE system? Are you insane?! Certainly brave If you're doing a NE prototype/test, for absolute sure use *exactly* the system that the binary is intended for.

Good luck, hope you can get stuff working OK.

ps - for the criminally insane, you can try my *completely unofficial, test, community* Ubuntu 8.04 binary:
https://sourceforge.net/project/show...roup_id=224243

[hjmangalam]

OK - made a presentation to powers that be, and got a 2nd stage 'Go' - we're going to commit to a live test. But before I enable that, I jacked up the system, pulled the OS, replaced with Ubuntu 6.06 32bit, upgraded to most recent updates, installed the same 5.0.5 Network Edition. Install went reasonably well aside from a couple of common missing debs which installed smoothly. I did symlink /opt/zimbra to a RAID filesystem for some more protection, but this did not seem to bother zimbra. Smooth as silk, right?

Well, mostly. Some oddities popped up right away.


# 1 - even tho the logger says that it's working, the message greeting me when I logged into the Admin console the 1st time (more on that below) was:

[Server status data is not available. To see the server status, logger service must be installed.]

It /IS/ installed, and, according to zmcontrol status:

$zmcontrol status
Host xxx.xxx.uci.edu
        antispam                Running
        antivirus               Running
        ldap                    Running
        logger                  Running
        mailbox                 Running
        mta                     Running
        snmp                    Running
        spell                   Running
        stats                   Running

that's what it's referring to, right? I thought it might be that there wasn't enough data to be reported, but the next day, it's the same error, tho with some quirks, see below.

# 2 - (Using firefox 2.0.0.14 on Kubuntu 7.10) the second time I tried to log into the admin console, I got as far as entering the 'admin' username and password and hitting [Enter]. then it continued 'Loading' forever. The debug window showed:

Loaded domainadmin.js
domainadmin.js is modifying ZaSettings
Loaded com_zimbra_license.js
Modify ZaGlobalConfig XModel
Adding function to modify GlobalConfig XForm

but nothing else happened. Oddly enough, if I restarted firefox, it DOES load, without any interaction (no need to enter login/password). But it does require a firefox restart.

Konqueror doesn't work at all. Opera & Galeon show the same behavior. And firefox (2.0.0.14) on Windows XP/SP2 has the same behavior (it doesn't have a restart function, but a stop/start will then allow me to log in to the Admin console). If I can't reliably get to the Admin page, it sort of ends our experiment with Zimbra.

[dwmtractor]

I can't help you with the FireFox weirdity (works on my FireFox 2.0.0.14 on XP, but I'm running FOSS not NE), but the issue with the logger is a gotcha I've seen other people have, and I had once myself. The logger service that isn't started is your syslogd process in Linux itself. Zimbra's logger depends on syslogd to gather its information, but for some odd reason it doesn't always start properly after an install.

Although it sounds too much like Window$ and may offend your sense of ethics it'll probably start fine with a reboot of the system. It is also a lot easier to manage process issues like this if you install Webmin (which'll install fine with apt-get). Anyhoo, I'm betting syslogd is stopped.

Since you're doing a demo of NE for people who are considering paying for it, you might want to contact tech support. Then you can not only tell your higher-ups how great the product is, and how great the forum is ( ) but also how great the paid tech support is. Plus they really do have some technical resources at their disposal from the inside that we non-employees don't have.

[hjmangalam]

Thanks, Dan for all the hints - I'll give them a try and start posting these oddities to the tech support (as well) to try it out. The reboot suggestion is (as you note) fairly offensive but I'll try it as I'm debugging some other OS issues with 6.06 and it needs to be restarted anyway.
Thanks for the advice!
harry

[hjmangalam]

However, I will note that firefox 3 beta 5 (still on Kubuntu) does behave correctly - I can log out and log back in and get the expected Admin console pagerepeatedly. However, rebooting does not fix the logger problem.

hjm