[SOLVED] 8th grade student needs help with install

[mvincent]

Hey guys, I am incharge of a discovery learning technology course. One of our students has been trying to install zimbra and is stuck. He is using a fedora 5 box and the newest release of zimbra opensource. He has reinstalled zimbra over 10 times and always ends up with an MTA problem.

Is there anyone in the zimbra community that might be willing to talk to the student. We have the ability to call any one in the US for free.

Feel free to pm me with suggestions.

Thanks

[phoenix]

Has he checked the forums for a solution, it's likely to be a simple error. The most common ones being DNS & host file configuration. Have him post his questions here.

[mvincent]

Here is the typology of our network.. We have one router with a static IP from that we are forwarding port 80 to our IIS server to serve a web page. We followed the notes and forwarded all the necesary ports to the zimbra box like stmp, https, all of that stuff. We edited zimbra to make it host the web mail on port 81. When we log in zimbra now the mta is checked and now our spellcheckisnt working. However I dont care about fixing spell check at this moment. I would like to just get the mail working.

I need to know what DNS configurations to make. Will I be actualy editing the DNS on the windows server? Or do i just make sure that the windows server ip is in the dns box under networking proporties for the card. Dns is confusing to me, and we have a DNS server for our windows domain (EASTLAB). Then we have the schools DNS, and lastyear while messing with the website stuff I remember having to have something reguarding dns done by the people who sold us our domain name. We have a valid domain name and one of those prefix names. www.mpseast.com and mail.mpseast.com they both point to our router.

Right now the zimbrahost name is localhost.localdomain. I am wondering what I have to do to send and recieve mail as user@mpseast.com?

Under the DNS tab in Network configuration we have :
Hostname = localhost.localdomain
Primary DNS = DNS server on our classroom network
Secondary DNS= 65.64.8.3 known good dns in the town next to us
Teritary DNS = blank
DNS search path= localdomain


thanks for the help.. I am sorry if I did not give you the information needed. We are totaly new at this.

[mmorse]

Are you ok with starting from scratch? -easier than changing your hostname
(see all the troubles with changing your zimbrahostname here: ZmSetServerName - ZimbraWiki)

Follow all the uninstall directions (UnInstall Zimbra - ZimbraWiki)
Change your hostname (in that 'Under the DNS tab in Network configuration') to mail.mpseast.com & reboot

your /etc/hosts file should look like
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
x.x.x.x.x mail.mpseast.com mail

Then once your back up and running in zimbra admin console:
So your email address isn't user@mail.mpseast.com you'll just create another domain 'mpseast.com' and make the new users there. You can easily (with a drop down) change what domain a user belongs too, but be careful with the admin account. (leave the mail.mpseast.com alone for now-it'll be setup to get admin emails etc)

Now you don't have to do split dns -you could just not use external ip/resolution/ with your static public IP for everything.
But you had said "DNS server on our classroom network" (what you would be doing instead of bind)
Split DNS - ZimbraWiki
/blog/archives/2007/06/making_zimbra_bind_work_together_1.html
OR
You send outbound mail through an existing server (if the school would allow you to connect)

An alternative to setting up a DNS server is to un-check "Enable DNS Lookups" on the MTA tab under Server configuration on the Zimbra Admin console. This requires a relay MTA to be configured somewhere that will accept all outbound email.

OR
lastly, there's the zimbraMailTransport mapping attribute

Incoming Mail Problems - ZimbraWiki

not your issue but for later there's also: Outgoing Mail Problems - ZimbraWiki

[mvincent]

Thank you mmorse. I have a student that is going to stay after school and attempt to figure it out. He was excited that you posted good valid resources. Some times knowing where to get valid info is more important than the answer its self.

I appreciate the help, and I continue to have the student update the thread under my account.

Thank you to everyone who is contributing. This really helps me teach the kids about professional resources.


Thanks again

Mike

[mmorse]

Sound's like you have good program there, and that's not even a HS or college!

I had an excellent HS Application Technology department, and we would do the same type of things as your doing in my electronics & computer repair classes. However, the school was looking to save $ (it's easier to put in a bunch of desks for a 'standard subject' class...) and the year after I left a key teacher retired; after a good 25+years of teaching. While the two remaining faculty could keep up 'tech design' which had like 20 modules to rotate through; as hard as they try their still understaffed (and subsequently underfunded) so it got reduced from 4 electronics courses to just 1 level. (not talking quantity of kids, but the difficulty of the course) It's a catch 22 because once your forced to do that-it's hard to convince administration to find the funds to add another few faculty > so that you can increase the complexity of the courses, etc, etc...

8th grade-think your the current winner for the 'youngest installer award' From our success stories section (actually the 1st post in that section):

Originally Posted by joshuamorgan

heres my testimonial:
'Zimbra Collaboration Suite was so easy-to-install, me, a 14-year-old K-12 student managed to install and configure it within 30 minutes, with no problems. Administration couldn't be easier, and the familiar webmail user interface means your relative who doesn't know what cookies are, can use it.'

heh. well i would be lieing if i said no problems. my /etc/hosts file looked like this:

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
127.0.0.1 mail.mydomain.com mail

i then changed the ip address of the mail.mydomain.com entry to the eth0 interface's ip address and everything worked fine.

good stuff zimbra team

[mvincent]

ok.. we uninstalled zimbra. reinstalled it. set the host name to mail.mpseast.com. changed the host file to the local ip of the computer 192.x.x.x mail.mpseast.com. However, the etho 0 settings under hosts in the network configuration panel is the routers ip and the name is mail.mpseast.com is that correct? The dns hostname under the network configuration pannel is still localhost.localdomain. is that correct?


After restarting the computer we are getting this error.

FAILED
Failed to start slapd. Attempting debug start to determine error. demon: bind(7) failed errno=99 (Cannot assign requested address) slap_open_listener: failed on ldap://mail.mpseast.com:389

So is the that normal for this part of the project. Do i just continue to configure dns or do i need to revise something before i mess with that?

[mvincent]

we also just tried seting the host file up like the last post where everything is 127.0.0.1 .
now when we start it up we get Starting ldap ... done. then nothing happens none of the other stuff starts.

[mmorse]

Originally Posted by mvincent

ok.. we uninstalled zimbra. reinstalled it. set the host name to mail.mpseast.com. changed the host file to the local ip of the computer 192.x.x.x mail.mpseast.com. However, the etho 0 settings under hosts in the network configuration panel is the routers ip and the name is mail.mpseast.com is that correct? The dns hostname under the network configuration pannel is still localhost.localdomain. is that correct?

try this order-it's easier if you workout the hosts stuff before you install zimbra
-uninstall zimbra
-change server hostname
-correct hostsfile
-reinstall zimbra (documentation is here /community/documentation.html)

Originally Posted by mvincent

After restarting the computer we are getting this error.

FAILED
Failed to start slapd. Attempting debug start to determine error. demon: bind(7) failed errno=99 (Cannot assign requested address) slap_open_listener: failed on ldap://mail.mpseast.com:389

So is the that normal for this part of the project. Do i just continue to configure dns or do i need to revise something before i mess with that?

Originally Posted by jholder

An error 99 usually indicates that although you have your hosts file correct, the IP on the interface is not the one in the hosts file.

slapd cannot bind to port 389 general, this would be because something else is already listening on that port, or there is a hostname mismatch, etc.

Originally Posted by mvincent

we also just tried seting the host file up like the last post where everything is 127.0.0.1 .
now when we start it up we get Starting ldap ... done. then nothing happens none of the other stuff starts.

If you look at that post closely it's actually what your not supposed to do

Originally Posted by joshuamorgan

heh. well i would be lieing if i said no problems. my /etc/hosts file looked like this:
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
127.0.0.1 mail.mydomain.com mail
i then changed the ip address of the mail.mydomain.com entry to the eth0 interface's ip address and everything worked fine.

-(are you going with a split dns?)
from the zimbra box, test resolution with

host `hostname` <-- backticks not single quotes
dig domain.com mx
dig domain.com any

[mvincent]

Thanks for the suggestions and redirection. The students who are now working on this server are now all on weekend and laborday break. We will start tinkering with the server again on Tuesday. So far this has been a positive experiance. The kids are asking much deeper questions than they would have if it would have worked right away. Two of the guys are still very confused by dns though. I am goign to look up some info on that subject this weekend and send them home with some reading material on Tuesday.

Thanks again.. There is some real learning going on here.