The FreeBSD Thread

[deepblackmagic]

As I'm sure most readers realize, a great many administrators choose to run *BSD as their ideal server OS, and as one such desperate admin looking for an exchange replacement im bound to post and ask for the greater good of mankind:

Will zimbra compile from source and install on FreeBSD 4.x? 5.x?

Will the linux binarys run in compatibility mode on the above?

Has anybody been able to successfully install zimbra on *BSD?

Are the developers interested in submitting a port, or is a port maintainer already assigned and working on it?

I'm sure there are more questions but im still in general information acquisition mode. If your a BSD admin and have zimbra working, please post any useful information to the rest of us.

[fudster]

I've been wondering the same thing, but my distro of choice is Gentoo Linux.

I found it interesting that there are only two distributions explicitly mentioned in the docs here (as far as I could see with a quick look). Not everyone uses Red Hat. :-)

I had a quick look through the forum here and I'm encouraged that building and running Zimbra on Gentoo shouldn't be too hard. I'd also like to be able to choose which servlet engine (i.e. Jetty).

[sardiskan]

The RedHat/FC3 install is actually very nice. But you're right. My OS of choice is FreeBSD. I certainly hope the ease of installation can be ported to the *BSD's.

[anand]

Just wanted to clarify and ease some anxiety - ZCS is very very portable. The reason you see only RHEL and FC are short term issues. We are working making the build more transparent (and therefore easy to port) and removing our dependency on iptables. The extent of platform specific code written by us is a JNI method that does hard links. ZCS can run wherever Java + Postfix + MySQL + OpenLDAP are available - not out of the box and not today, but soon. Hopefully we will also see portability across LDAP servers and databases. Contributions towards these ends are welcome.

[Yvonne]

I use Courier + SqWebmail on a FreeBSD 4.10 box and I an interested to change to Zimbra, but on that box I also run Apache with PHP/MySQL and a web backup using MySQL.
So it is very important for me that the "included" MySQL don't conflict with any existing MySQL.

[KevinH]

So it is very important for me that the "included" MySQL don't conflict with any existing MySQL.

Understand. We'll move our port to be different so it won't conflict if you're using the default on your install.

[fak3r]

If/when I get Zimbra running on Gentoo - I'll look at what it'll take to move it to FreeBSD - which is what my main/live server is using. Once that's done a port shouldn't be too tough, esp since they have a src download avail.

fak3r

[Bleve]

how're you going with this? I'm pretty keen to test on NetBSD which should be very similar to NetBSD.

[dachtera]

I have a few production servers, running BSD 5.x and a new one running 6.x. I am very interested in Zimbra for a mail solution. I would be more than happy to contribute space, resources towards the testing on FreeBSD. I even have a spare box or two I could build for complete testing purposes. Let me know if this sparks any interest with the Zimbra dev crew.

Thanks - Tim