I give up

[rainynight65]

I have been struggling my rear end off for the past 24 hours in several attempts at installing Zimbra OS on a VPS with Debian 3.1. The machine has got 1GB of dedicated RAM. Seeing that I was able to install it in a VMWare virtual machine which had only 512MB of RAM, I do not believe that is the main problem.

I always follow these steps: deactivate confliciting services (Apache, Mysql etc.), edit /etc/hosts, install missing dependencies, run install.sh. It always tells me that there is no MX configured for the host, but can that really be such a massive problem (my VMWare experiment had no DNS config at all)? The result however is always the following:

Initializing Documents...failed to initialize documents...see logfile for details.

And then the logfile tells me:

Initializing Documents...
*** Running as zimbra user: /opt/zimbra/bin/zmprov mc default zimbraFeatureNotebookEnabled TRUE


[] INFO: I/O exception (java.net.ConnectException) caught when processing request: Connection refused
[] INFO: Retrying request
[] INFO: I/O exception (java.net.ConnectException) caught when processing request: Connection refused
[] INFO: Retrying request
[] INFO: I/O exception (java.net.ConnectException) caught when processing request: Connection refused
[] INFO: Retrying request
ERROR: zclient.IO_ERROR (invoke Connection refused, server: localhost) (cause: java.net.ConnectException Connection refused)
*** Running as zimbra user: /opt/zimbra/bin/zmprov mcf zimbraNotebookAccount lzyjmc4ve9@lds80-86-91-144.webperoni.de

[] INFO: I/O exception (java.net.ConnectException) caught when processing request: Connection refused
[] INFO: Retrying request
[] INFO: I/O exception (java.net.ConnectException) caught when processing request: Connection refused
[] INFO: Retrying request
[] INFO: I/O exception (java.net.ConnectException) caught when processing request: Connection refused
[] INFO: Retrying request
ERROR: zclient.IO_ERROR (invoke Connection refused, server: localhost) (cause: java.net.ConnectException Connection refused)
*** Running as zimbra user: /opt/zimbra/bin/zmprov in lzyjmc4ve9@lds80-86-91-144.webperoni.de 'uF8EpZRLCH' /opt/zimbra/wiki/Template Template

[] INFO: I/O exception (java.net.ConnectException) caught when processing request: Connection refused
[] INFO: Retrying request
[] INFO: I/O exception (java.net.ConnectException) caught when processing request: Connection refused
[] INFO: Retrying request
[] INFO: I/O exception (java.net.ConnectException) caught when processing request: Connection refused
[] INFO: Retrying request
ERROR: zclient.IO_ERROR (invoke Connection refused, server: localhost) (cause: java.net.ConnectException Connection refused)
*** Running as zimbra user: /opt/zimbra/bin/zmprov mc default zimbraFeatureNotebookEnabled FALSE

[] INFO: I/O exception (java.net.ConnectException) caught when processing request: Connection refused
[] INFO: Retrying request
[] INFO: I/O exception (java.net.ConnectException) caught when processing request: Connection refused
[] INFO: Retrying request
[] INFO: I/O exception (java.net.ConnectException) caught when processing request: Connection refused
[] INFO: Retrying request
ERROR: zclient.IO_ERROR (invoke Connection refused, server: localhost) (cause: java.net.ConnectException Connection refused)
failed to initialize documents...see logfile for details.

Then zmcontrol tells me that tomcat and logger aren't running. There never is a redo.log file, although the zimbra user has full permissions on the parent directory.

I thought I had made a mistake in configuring the /etc/hosts, so I checked this morning and corrected it. However, to no avail. The /etc/hosts looks like this:

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
80.86.91.144 lds80-86-91-144.webperoni.de lds80-86-91-144

The FQDN has been assigned by the provider. This is a 3-day test box, so I can't really muck around with the DNS too much.

I am completely and utterly at the end of my wisdom and my strength. I would have loved to use Zimbra in my organization, but apparently it is just not going to happen, unless someone has an idea what the heck I am doing wrong. Could it be related to the fact that I am running a virtual server? Should I rather get a dedicated box? Or is there simply no chance with less than 2GB RAM?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[phoenix]

If I telnet to the IP address you've got then I see another mail server running, ESMPT in your case. This is the response:

220 lds80-86-91-144.webperoni.de ESMTP

The documents problem isn't important at the moment, stop the mail server, disable it from starting and the zmcontrol stop/start - does that work?

[rainynight65]

Originally Posted by phoenix

If I telnet to the IP address you've got then I see another mail server running, ESMPT in your case. This is the response:

220 lds80-86-91-144.webperoni.de ESMTP

The documents problem isn't important at the moment, stop the mail server, disable it from starting and the zmcontrol stop/start - does that work?

That may very well be, since I have reinstalled the server a few times today already, so you may have caught me with another mail server running. Whenever I tried to install Zimbra, I deactivated everything else first, and Zimbra never gave me port conflicts. But I will check. Thanks.

[friedmar]

Hello,

if it is a VPS System have in mind that Zimbra calculates its memory needs on the real memory. Also Java calculates on the real memory of the host system, not the VPS memory.

To solve this I modified zmshutil that it returns the memory of the VPS and not of the real server.

Also it was necessary to modify the java calls in zmjava, zmlocalconfig, zmcertinstall and zmcreatecert.

eg:

exec ${zimbra_java_home}/bin/java \
-client -Xmx48m \
-Dzimbra.home=${zimbra_home} \
-Djava.library.path=${zimbra_home}/lib \
-Djava.ext.dirs=${JRE_EXT_DIR}:${zimbra_home}/lib/jars \
"$@"


I hope this helps.

Regards,

Friedmar

[rainynight65]

Originally Posted by friedmar

Hello,

if it is a VPS System have in mind that Zimbra calculates its memory needs on the real memory. Also Java calculates on the real memory of the host system, not the VPS memory.

To solve this I modified zmshutil that it returns the memory of the VPS and not of the real server.

Also it was necessary to modify the java calls in zmjava, zmlocalconfig, zmcertinstall and zmcreatecert.

eg:

exec ${zimbra_java_home}/bin/java \
-client -Xmx48m \
-Dzimbra.home=${zimbra_home} \
-Djava.library.path=${zimbra_home}/lib \
-Djava.ext.dirs=${JRE_EXT_DIR}:${zimbra_home}/lib/jars \
"$@"


I hope this helps.

Regards,

Friedmar

friedmar, that sounds interesting. Can you give me some more information about that, especially the zmshutil modification? I am unfortunately not that jacked in Linux things

EDIT: Okay, what I did now was change zmshutil to return a fixed figure (the amount of RAM given to my VPS in KB). That seems to have done the trick - everything is running and I can access the web interface. Thanks for the hint friedmar.

[friedmar]

Hello,

here is my modification of zmshutil:

...
#
# Get available system memory in KB.
#
zmsysmemkb() {
if [ -f /proc/meminfo ]; then
# adjust for vserver
# memkb=`awk '/^MemTotal.*kB$/ { print $2; }' /proc/meminfo`
memkb=`awk '/^MemTotal.*kB$/ { print $2i/12; }' /proc/meminfo`
else
memkb=$(sysctl hw.memsize 2>/dev/null | awk -F: '{ print $2 / 1024; }');
fi
if ! echo $memkb | grep '^[0-9]*$' > /dev/null; then
memkb=524288
fi
echo $memkb
}

My VPS has 512M and the servers real memory is 6G. So just divide by 12!

Friedmar

[hvwees]

Originally Posted by friedmar

Hello,

if it is a VPS System have in mind that Zimbra calculates its memory needs on the real memory. Also Java calculates on the real memory of the host system, not the VPS memory.

I also run zimbra on a VPS and had big trouble getting it to work.

For example:

/opt/zimbra/bin/zmlocalconfig
Error occurred during initialization of VM
Could not reserve enough space for object heap
Could not create the Java virtual machine.

Found this post and went searching in the memory stuff of the VPS.

What I did to solve this issue is the folowing:

cat /proc/meminfo > /etc/fake_meminfo

Edited the lines "MemTotal:" and "LowTotal:" to my actual memory that my VPS has.

Then I did:
mount --bind /etc/fake_meminfo /proc/meminfo

Now I don't get these java errors anymore.

I admit it's a dirty trick, but it works.

Hope this helps other VPS users aswell..