Trying to mitigate problems with OS X Server

[jbuell]

So we've (again) run into the DNS bug that Apple never fixed with 10.5.x. We'd like to upgrade our server for 10.6.x, and possibly upgrade ZCS from 5.0.25 (which we just went to this week) to 6.0.x. But I'm seeing that there have been problems with Java on 10.6.x. Is there any good way around this? Should we stay on 10.5? What would be the best advice if we wanted to have a secondary server running ZCS live for redundancy purposes?

Thanks in advance!

John

[n4bbq]

Hello John,

I'm a former OSX user. There was issue after issue until I moved our stuff to Ubuntu and haven't looked back.

On the Mac java issue, we just had to move our SIS database (Oracle) from OSX to Win2008 for the same thing.

I'm not a Mac basher (we still use MacOS on many of our servers), but if I were you, I'd start thinking about another OS for Zimbra.

To stay on topic, if I were you and could live with the DNS thang, I'd not move a muscle. Anytime I changed something, I just induced something else.

Good luck,
Phil

[jbuell]

Yeah, this is exactly what I was afraid of. I'm thinking Ubuntu or Fedora. Thanks for the heads up!

[jbuell]

Just a note if anyone else wants to try this - don't. I wasted my morning this morning, but had a backup of our system drive thanks to Carbon Copy Cloner. Tried going from 10.5.8 to 10.6.6. No go. Rolled back to 10.5.8 and it's ok again.

We're seriously considering a trial run of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS 32-bit with ZCS on a VMWare box to become a replica, then get away from using OS X for the underlying OS for ZCS altogether.

Pity that Apple's made this such a P.I.T.A.

[n4bbq]

Well when you migrate, this method worked.

Migration Mac OS 10.5 (ZCS 6.05 - 32bit) -> Ubuntu 8.04LTS (ZCS 6.05 - 64bit)

What I did do, was set up a dummy server and did about two moves to make sure I had my steps right before doing it on the production machine.

It'll take a weekend to do the tests, make notes, then do the real move.

[quanah]

We're seriously considering a trial run of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS 32-bit with ZCS on a VMWare box to become a replica, then get away from using OS X for the underlying OS for ZCS altogether.

Since 32-bit's lifetime is very limited, I would advise you to investigate a 64-bit OS instead.

Zimbra Downloads FAQ: Phase-Out of 32bit

--Quanah

[jbuell]

Hi Quanah,

Thanks for the reminder.

What I'm working on is a process to move everything off the Mac running 5.0.26 32-bit, onto Linux running the same, then upgrade to the 6.x series, and THEN go 64-bit. We're going to need new server hardware for that final step, everything else I can do with what we have now.