Preinstallation questions

[digduality]

I currently have Ubuntu Breezy 5.10 server installed (and really stripped down the services running on it).

It is currently running Novell's Hula Groupware (alpha and discontinued ) and Breezy has finally stopped giving security updates.

I'm running apache web server and an ftp server off of the machine as well.

Now the laughable part. It's a Pentium 2, 266mhz, with 128mb of ram. The machine has served me very well in this fashion.

After hearing so much, and playing with the demo's for zimbra.. and noticing how out of date my server now is and no longer able to get security updates.. i was wondering if my sweet little obsolete machine would be able to handle and run zimbra for approximately 5 mail accounts.

i see the system requirements are much higher than what i currently have to spare, but Hula's was as well and it did just fine.

any advise would be greatly appreciated. I really don't feel like going the typical postfix or sendmail route.

[jholder]

I tried that.
I spent an entire day trying to get Zimbra running on CentOS 4 with 128MB.
I stopped EVERYTHING I could.

I never got it to work, I just didn't have enough memory for tomcat to run.

My advise would be to give it a try.
Stop everything, and stop the AV/AS logger, and snmp on Zimbra.
The odds are against ya, but if you like a good fight, this is one.

[dspillett]

I wouldn't if I were you... My first setup was on a virtual machine with 512Mb RAM allocated. It worked fine, but pretty slowly in places and quite quickly ate not much less than 512Mb of swap space (which would explain the slow pace - things being juggled between swap and real RAM fairly constantly).

There is an entry in the wiki for getting Zimbra to work in 256Mb for a small installation, so you might want to look at that. If you can upgrade your server to 512Mb then this might be worth a try - if it works at all on 256Mb with those tweaks then it might work fast enough on 512Mb. Of course, it might work fast enough for your expectations on less - I could be being overly picky and impatient!

After sorting the RAM, you might find that PII processor very limiting too though. I think you would be better off doing one of the following:

1. Replacing the server completely
2. Renting a dedicated server or VPS somewhere (though this could obviously be costly, and won't be on your local LAN so will be much slower for local users)
3. Picking a solution with a smaller footprint (I've had scalix running in 384Mb for testing and looking at it's swap usage 256Mb may well be OK too) though you will most likely loose features as Zimbra seems to be the most feature complete of the F/OSS (or almost F/OSS!) solutions that promise stability.

In short: I think you are out of luck on such an old server, though if you can get some more RAM into it (if nowhere else then you'll find some not-too-expensive on eBay) it might be worth a try if you have plenty of time to burn. FYI, I've just upgraded the dedicated server that I use for personal/family/friends projects so my next test install will be on a VM with 1024Mb RAM on a much nicer host machine... I think the install guide isn't being OTT in suggesting 1Gb as a sensible minimum for a full install with no bits turned off.