Simply cannot install 7.1.1

[cabletastic]

Hi there - I had a V7 box running for years without problems. A few weeks ago it stopped delivering mail to my mailbox. I tried to find out what this is but as there is only myself and my wife (and a few randoms) on the mail server I decided to just nuke the box and build a new Ubuntu 10.04 LTS one (previous was 8.0.4).
Environment is exactly the same - I copied the hosts, named.conf and DNS zone file from old and put back onto new but when I try to install it a) takes ages an b)halts at installing zimbra-store, so much so that it drops my SSH connection.
It is on a VMWare virtual server, with plenty of RAM and CPU so I am at a loss as to why this is happening on what is a brand new, vanilla server....
I have just uninstalled and am going to be trying yet again at some point so don't have a zimbra.log to show you all (stupid mistake, I know!) but if anyone has any clue as to what might be happening I'd be very grateful.
Cheers
Si

[phoenix]

Originally Posted by cabletastic

Hi there - I had a V7 box running for years without problems. A few weeks ago it stopped delivering mail to my mailbox. I tried to find out what this is but as there is only myself and my wife (and a few randoms) on the mail server I decided to just nuke the box and build a new Ubuntu 10.04 LTS one (previous was 8.0.4).
Environment is exactly the same - I copied the hosts, named.conf and DNS zone file from old and put back onto new but when I try to install it a) takes ages an b)halts at installing zimbra-store, so much so that it drops my SSH connection.
It is on a VMWare virtual server, with plenty of RAM and CPU so I am at a loss as to why this is happening on what is a brand new, vanilla server....

What, exactly, is 'plenty of RAM and CPU'? Hardware specifications and what else is running on this server?

Originally Posted by cabletastic

I have just uninstalled and am going to be trying yet again at some point so don't have a zimbra.log to show you all (stupid mistake, I know!) but if anyone has any clue as to what might be happening I'd be very grateful.
Cheers

It's not possible to give you any advice without some information about the problem.

[cabletastic]

OK - it has 3Gb of RAM and two 2.93Ghz dual core CPUs - v7 ran flawlessly on this.
I ma rerunning the install but this is proving tricky as the CPU usage spikes so high that it drops my shell connection. As soon as I have some logs (zimbra.log is empty) I will paste them through.

[phoenix]

Originally Posted by cabletastic

OK - it has 3Gb of RAM and two 2.93Ghz dual core CPUs - v7 ran flawlessly on this.

Is that the server or the VM? The VM allocation for RAM and CPUs would be useful. I also asked what else is running on this server?

[cabletastic]

The only other server daemons on this are BIND, as a pre-requisite and ssh. That aside, it is not running any other services and in normal usage (ie not installing Zimbra!) the CPU ticks over at less than 0.1% and the mem equally so. VM allocation is 3Gb and 2 VCPUs with a High Priority reservation.
As I mentioned before and in fact as we speak, it is at 'Installing zimbra-core' and taking an age to do this- it will eventually get through this, run through some more packages and then kick me off my connection - if I run from VM console it runs through the post install steps but then doesn't start up the mailbox component and thus webmail and admin are not started.

[phoenix]

Originally Posted by cabletastic

The only other server daemons on this are BIND, as a pre-requisite and ssh. That aside, it is not running any other services and in normal usage (ie not installing Zimbra!) the CPU ticks over at less than 0.1% and the mem equally so. VM allocation is 3Gb and 2 VCPUs with a High Priority reservation.

Using 1 VCPU should be sufficient for this.

Originally Posted by cabletastic

As I mentioned before and in fact as we speak, it is at 'Installing zimbra-core' and taking an age to do this- it will eventually get through this, run through some more packages and then kick me off my connection - if I run from VM console it runs through the post install steps but then doesn't start up the mailbox component and thus webmail and admin are not started.

You should use the screen utility to stop the session from being terminated and let it run through to completion. You mentioned it's in VMware, which hypervisor is it ESXi or Workstation? I assume this is a 64bit machine? If you're not particularly wedded to Ubuntu, have you considered trying another distribution such as RHEL (use CentOS if you want free )?

[vavai]

Originally Posted by cabletastic

The only other server daemons on this are BIND, as a pre-requisite and ssh. That aside, it is not running any other services and in normal usage (ie not installing Zimbra!) the CPU ticks over at less than 0.1% and the mem equally so. VM allocation is 3Gb and 2 VCPUs with a High Priority reservation.
As I mentioned before and in fact as we speak, it is at 'Installing zimbra-core' and taking an age to do this- it will eventually get through this, run through some more packages and then kick me off my connection - if I run from VM console it runs through the post install steps but then doesn't start up the mailbox component and thus webmail and admin are not started.

Maybe the installation log (on /tmp folder) would be give us a further information. Failing zimbra-core installation ussually related to insufficient memory but as you've told us, it should no. So, IMHO, it would help if you look at the installation log and find any information related to the problem.

[cabletastic]

Thanks sir - I'll check that log out. Just odd that it ramps up so much that it even squeezes my ssh connection to death. For ref it's on a huge ESX cluster at our datacentre. According to the 'ever reliable' VMWare performance monitor it never gets above 15% CPU (according to top however it gets to 190% CPU) - mem usage is not an issue according to either VMWare or top...... Never experienced this before..

[cabletastic]

OK - checking out that log gets me:-

sudo tail -f install.log.11539
[sudo] password for simon:
Stopping zmconfigd...Done.
Stopping ldap...Done.
COMMAND: /opt/zimbra/libexec/zmslapcat /opt/zimbra/data/ldap
slapcat: bad configuration directory!
Selecting previously deselected package zimbra-core.
(Reading database ...
dpkg: warning: files list file for package `zimbra-store' missing, assuming package has no files currently installed.
44187 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking zimbra-core (from .../zimbra-core_7.1.2_GA_3268.UBUNTU10_64_amd64.deb) ...
usermod: no changes


SO, it looks like after my previous abortive attempt at install and uninstall, some LDAP data has remained. So, I would suggest I need to do another uninstall and start again - question then is how do I totally clean out any LDAP related shenannigans please (unless of course the above is a misnomer)?
Thanks in advance guys.

[phoenix]

You remove everything with "./install.sh -u".