Install in directory other than /opt/zimbra

[olafth]

Quick question:

Is there a list of things to be done when you would want to install Zimbra in a directory other than /opt/zimbra?

Thanks!

[Baylink]

A quick examination of the installer script says there's no "official" way to do this -- I did it by merely making /opt/zimbra a symlink to /appl/zimbra509, which seems to be working ok... though I had a "can't find the license" problem on install, and don't know if that was why.

[mmorse]

Note: Bug 14725 – Installer fails to follow and destroyes symbolic links
Better to use mount, with the --bind switch to link two directories.

Hard links (ln without the -s) can be used on directories but it's not typical, thus a force flag (usage is -d, -F, or --directory) so you should read up on pro's vs con's, and can't cross file system boundaries (disk partition).

Vote: Bug 10955 – allow installation to location other than /opt/zimbra/

[Baylink]

I'd never seen those switches to ln(1), but note that the man page says they'll probably fail... and even if you *do* get the link, everything else on your machine (fsck, updatedb, etc) will become very unhappy.

I'm going to vote for both bugs; it is *not* the province of a release manager to decide where an application subsystem must live on my machines.

FWIW, 5.0.9 on CentOS 5.2 installed over the symlink just fine for me.

[dijichi2]

using hardlinks in that way is a horribly bad idea. don't do it.

/opt/zimbra is hardcoded in quite a few places. as zimbra is such an isolated (mostly) self-sufficient package, keeping it in a known constant place isn't such a bad idea.

[olafth]

Originally Posted by dijichi2

using hardlinks in that way is a horribly bad idea. don't do it.

/opt/zimbra is hardcoded in quite a few places. as zimbra is such an isolated (mostly) self-sufficient package, keeping it in a known constant place isn't such a bad idea.

I agree, but our configuration (local storage mirrored pairwise via drdb) requires different install-directories, once we add an active-active cluster configuration to this. Or vhosts, but let's not open that can of worms...

[Baylink]

Yup, see?

"Deciding the install location of a software package does not fall within the purview of a release manager". I know I've heard that somewhere... :-)

[dijichi2]

I agree, but our configuration (local storage mirrored pairwise via drdb) requires different install-directories, once we add an active-active cluster configuration to this. Or vhosts, but let's not open that can of worms...

have you got zimbra working succesfully under drbd? do you replicate the entire /opt/zimbra or just storage and use application-level replication for ldap/sql?

zimbra was designed to really be the only thing on a box hence the certain assumptions it's made like installation path. why does /opt/zimbra cause a problem for your setup, is it not flexible to change paths?

please do let us know how you get on with active-active, that would be a holy grail of HA for zimbra - it's currently a huge hole in it technically. it's rumoured to provide storage replication in version 5.5..

[olafth]

Originally Posted by dijichi2

have you got zimbra working succesfully under drbd? do you replicate the entire /opt/zimbra or just storage and use application-level replication for ldap/sql?

No, we're succesfully replicating /opt/zimbra to another box. We're pairing them, two boxes mirror one another.

Originally Posted by dijichi2

zimbra was designed to really be the only thing on a box hence the certain assumptions it's made like installation path. why does /opt/zimbra cause a problem for your setup, is it not flexible to change paths?

It's not the setup that makes the problem. If we want to run a pair of those boxes as active-active cluster, we NEED the directories to be different, to run both packages at the same time on ONE box, in failure case. To be exact, we need one directory to be different. But it's easier to have them both different. The pathname is the one thing that keeps us from trying.

Originally Posted by dijichi2

please do let us know how you get on with active-active, that would be a holy grail of HA for zimbra - it's currently a huge hole in it technically. it's rumoured to provide storage replication in version 5.5..

I'll keep posting our accomplishments here.

[cherny]

Solved using:

mount --bind /home/zimbra/ /opt/zimbra/

You can change /home/zimbra for whatever you want And you must create both directories before