Nightmare !!! (Mac OS X)

[kygeek]

Originally Posted by raj

i read all the posts on this thred..every line..
here is my conclusion.

@kygeek: you only read "PART" of replies and sugessions people are giving here, remember we are not getting "PAID" by you or by zimbra..we just here to help
* you only reply on a "PART" of the reply you think u can bash

with this way i guess u will or already have run out of options which "community" users were to offer you.

- if you think you cannot merge the 2 instances then you are sadly mistaken.
i- f you think my reply told you to move from mac then as eplained above you not reading in full
- if you think we are bashing you to voice your concern then..you are sadly mistaken..coz its easy for us "not" to reply or help you, but we still are trying to help.

i am sure there hunredes of MAC uers/admins for who all this works just fine.


Raj

im not sure how i replied to only part of what you had to say.... did you not say that it didnt matter what i ran on the server did not matter ?
i do not believe that i stated that merging the two installations was an impossible task. I havent bashed anyone that actually offered help .... the only help seemingly offered were suggestions to migrate to linux or another OS besides OSX.... Also suggestions that the 'BETA' shouldnt be used in a production environment were not helpful either. I also believe that my original frustration was pointed at zimbra support... i did state that in the original post. It was not my intention to make this a war of whose OS is better than whose. I simply wanted some well thought out suggestions. None of which i really received. The only help i have received here has been from Quanah and he has been actively been helping me try to work the issue. In my experience it is much better to actually work the issue at hand and find a work around (there is almost always a work around ) than to just throw your hands up and revert to the old version...or to change the entire OS just because of something that cannot be explained or reproduced reliably. I always appreciate suggestions from the community and have participated in many open source projects myself even on the developer level...so i get how this model works... i just found it frustrating that some posters would rather just bash my choice of platform than to actually offer something constructive. I know that some of the participants here do not directly work for zimbra nor have i compensated them, however, my frustration did not lie with any of those folks unless provoked. I made it clear i was frustrated with zimbra support for passing the buck. Ironically the only real help i received from this thread has been from a Zimbra Employee and those are the folks i actually aimed my frustrations at the start and not the community. All suggestions in this thread have been very broad and open ended and not really been that useful... most posts do not actually suggest much at all.....and thats okay...everyone is entitled to their opinion. I think ZCS is a wonderful product and has great potential and would love to see it grow for many years to come. I would hate to see issues like poor support cause folks to stray away from something that has so much potential. I evaluated many exchange alternatives out there and by far ZCS has them beat feature/functionality wise. I evaluated exchange 07 as well....and ZCS beats it hands down in many areas....
at any rate. its late and i hope to wake up to a still functioning mail server.

[digitaltendencies]

Originally Posted by kygeek

do you really think i havent thought about my options at this point ?!? that isnt really what this is about... its about not getting good service.... and then i come in here and basically get bashed for making the choice to use a mac. I made this choice for reasons i have stated earlier. I went with ZCS because it did work on a mac. I suppose then what everyone is saying is that the OSX version is useless and should be removed from the download section because no help will be offered here other than advice to switch to an alternate OS.

Just an FYI,
I only saw one person bash macs.
Everyone else saying it's a problem only with MacOS X 10.5
The network edition download page does show the Beta tag for 10.5

Now the fact that they let you buy a license, it should have come with warnings and list of known issues with running on 10.5

[kygeek]

yeah it does show the beta tag.... but IF this bug is actually at the OS level it shouldnt be put out for consumption. Im not so sure that there is not a work around as the DNS issue changed into other issues all of which seem to have been tracked down at this point. and there was quite a bit of talk about switching platforms. at any rate. hopefully it will be stable now...we will see

[fab]

We had exactly the same nightmare today.
I have filed the zimbra bug #32613 mentioned above and I can confirm that it is not to be strictly considered a zimbra bug but instead a Mac OS X OpenDirectory service flaw, as also detailed in the bug report page.
We have two Xserve Intel with Mac OS 10.5.8 server running ZCS OpenSource (one mta/ldap master and one ldap replica/maibox server); yesterday I had upgraded zimbra from 5.0.18 to 6.0.1: version 5 was stable (the bug caused those dns/dscache flaws very rarely and my "workaround" script in crontab can handle them) but with version 6 the whole mta subsystem became unusable, amavis and/or postfix stopped working after a few minutes I started them following the "usual" pattern.
We have more than 3000 users so we couldn't stay with such an unreliable mail service, therefore I had to downgrade to version 5 (I luckily had a full backup of both servers).
The bad thing is that the Apple folks seem to do nothing to fix their OS bug, while the zimbra folks just wait for the OS bug to be fixed (we have a lot of Xserve and only ZCS is actually affected by this problem).
For me, this is further evidence that Mac OS X server cannot be used for enterprise purposes different from Apple Final Cut Server or similar, indeed our next servers will no longer be Apple Xserve.
On the other side, I also have to agree with kygeek because Zimbra cannot sell its ZCS suite NE as "Working with Mac OS X", at least until the dscache bug is fixed by Apple or Zimbra finds a valid workaround.

[fab]

Originally Posted by quanah

I've never seen it occur on an OSX 10.5 system that had not either encountered a hard reboot of some sort. We've extensively tested our upgrade procedures without seeing this ever occur.

Also, if the DNS bits you refer to after this were the issue, we'd always see it for servers, not have it only show up after hard locks.

I disagree. Yesterday I had just upgraded from 5.0.18 to 6.0.1 (no reboot, no hard lock, no power outage) and the problem popped out after less than one hour the ZCS 6 services had started.
I forgot to mention that with ZCS 6 we have also experienced some java problems, reported here:
Java problems with ZCS 6.0.1 GA (Mac OS X 10.5)

[bhwong]

If it's a Mac OS bug, how come only version 6 has this problem and not version 5?

[phoenix]

Originally Posted by bhwong

If it's a Mac OS bug, how come only version 6 has this problem and not version 5?

I guess you still didn't read the bug report, for that user the problem occured in 5.0.10. The problem can occur for either Zimbra 5.x or 6.x releases and not every installation will have the problem as has already been mentioned earlier.

[quanah]

Originally Posted by fab

I disagree. Yesterday I had just upgraded from 5.0.18 to 6.0.1 (no reboot, no hard lock, no power outage) and the problem popped out after less than one hour the ZCS 6 services had started.

Please be specific in what "the problem" is. There are a number of issues that have been discussed in this thread, some related to the Directory Services cache corruption, some not.

[fab]

Originally Posted by quanah

Please be specific in what "the problem" is. There are a number of issues that have been discussed in this thread, some related to the Directory Services cache corruption, some not.

I meant the same problem I had reported in bug #32613, the mta stopped delivering messages because of the dscache/dns issue we experienced under Mac OS 10.5 and we had such entries in zimbra.log:

Sep 16 10:28:12 mta postfix/smtpd[14805]: E186B4D4DAD0: client=unknown[xxx.xxx.101.11]
Sep 16 10:28:12 mta postfix/cleanup[13082]: E186B4D4DAD0: message-id=<20090916082810.831801018A49_AB0A19AF@smtp1.mydomain.com>
Sep 16 10:28:12 mta postfix/smtpd[14805]: disconnect from unknown[xxx.xxx.101.11]
Sep 16 10:28:12 mta postfix/qmgr[10919]: E186B4D4DAD0: from=, size=2185, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Sep 16 10:28:12 mta postfix/error[14479]: E186B4D4DAD0: to=, relay=none, delay=0.01, delays=0.01/0/0/0, dsn=4.4.2, status=deferred (delivery temporarily suspended: lost connection with 127.0.0.1[127.0.0.1] while sending DATA command)

The only way to have the mta subsystem again at work was, as with zcs 5, to issue the commands:
zmmtactl stop; zmamavisdctl stop
zmamavisdctl start; zmmtactl start

[mbd]

I (currently) run Zimbra (5.0.18) on a Mac. I like Macs and manage a lot of them. I like Linux too (at least as a Server OS, perhaps not so much as a desktop OS) and have been using it for over 15 years.

I'm running my Zimbra install (5.x) on a 10.4 Server running Intel chips, which is what Zimbra supports. The fact that they don't support 10.5 or 10.6, and that I've seen bugs on Zimbra on the Mac that shouldn't have got past QA testing is currently making me lean towards migrating towards a Linux based solution in the future.

Getting angry at Zimbra for selling you a license doesn't seam reasonable. You have access to the documentation before purchasing to find out what supported versions exist. I'm not sure that Zimbra can necessarily be expected to qualify which OS you're going to be running any more than whether you're going to put enough RAM, Disk, etc into the machine. That's up to you, and your responsibility before you buy. Anyone who risks running unsupported software in production does so with an increased risk. Anyone who upgrades to a major release of OS or Zimbra Server almost immediately on release is asking for trouble (Zimbra didn't hit 5.0.18 because everything was great in 5.0 or 5.0.1). Anyone who decides to upgrade to a new major release right after launch on an unsupported OS without having a decent changeplan which includes testing on non-production machines, having several test points during the production upgrade, and backout plans should they not succeed is just asking for trouble.

I'm not mac bashing, and the I hope the idiot who suggests throwing the mac out the window is standing under it if anyone follows his advice.

But, I think you might need to have a good hard think about proper implementation planning in future to avoid the kinds of problems you're experiencing now.

Given the comments about using Linux, Mac, being a developer, etc I'm sure you're a pretty bright guy, so I hope you're not taking this as an insult, but I think you may find having a read of Tom Limoncelli's 'The Practice of System and Network Administration' would be worthwhile.