My successful Zimbra install

[carlsanders]

After trying a number of operating systems compatible with the latest release, none of which worked for one reason or another, I settled on FC7, which only needed:

1) "yum install fetchmail"
2) comment out the line in /etc/sudoers with "Default securetty"
3) use domain.com, not host.domain.com in order to pull the MX record

I run a split e-mail, split-dns network at home, with two commercial firewalls, and a DMZ where my external smtp and dns servers lie. The external smtp is a forwarder to the internal smtp server. The external dns server serves the outside world, while the internal servers the internal network.

Anyway, if you any of you do this also, note that you can still use whatever internal IP and dns scheme you desire. Because your internal users point at the internal DNS server, you can create a cname record (an alias), so both the external and internal DNS servers return the same host.domain.com name.

What this means is that you can tell all of your users, both those working from home or on the road, or those who only work in the office, the same exact domain name and it'll work fine.

I must say I really like Zimbra. My work uses this, while I was using Thunderbird and imap to get my personal e-mail. Already I can tell you the junk mail (amavist) is better in Zimbra than in Thunderbird, and I've been a loyal user of the latter for five years.

The downside is that my little hand-built AMD 2GHz server is thrashing itself. The java is killing it. So, one day I'm gonna have to do something about this. Fortunately, it's just me and a couple of other users so it's no big deal right now. I went ahead and turned off every service that I could find, and that helped a bit.

Overall I'm very, very impressed at the amount of work that went into this and the quality of the end result. I can administer multiple domains with surprising ease, the skins seem decent, and I'm still exploring and testing out the feature set, which is quite rich.

Beers all around!

[Mike Scholes]

You might try Firefox 3, it's a beta but it's much faster at rendering Zimbra pages. The drag-n-drop add-in doesn't work though.

[carlsanders]

Thanks.

I re-visited top, and found that I had only put 512mb RAM in the dang thing.
It was using 1GB, otherwise, it was paging 512 mb. Ouch. I've ordered
up the max the little micro-atx motherboard will take from newegg: 2 x 1gb.

That should help a ton.

[dwmtractor]

Originally Posted by carlsanders

Thanks.

I re-visited top, and found that I had only put 512mb RAM in the dang thing.
It was using 1GB, otherwise, it was paging 512 mb. Ouch. I've ordered
up the max the little micro-atx motherboard will take from newegg: 2 x 1gb.

That should help a ton.

It will. You will be shocked how much better the whole thing will perform on 2GB. I'm running 34 users (total mailstore about 4GB, roughly 600 messages/day) on a 1.4GHz Pentium III with 2GB and it never breaks a sweat. Same machine really lugged with only 512MB even when I was the only test user.

[Dannie]

Goos for you.. I am new here, I hope I'll be successful as you are.. I hope to know more about you guys..

Thanks so much..

[carlsanders]

Yeah, the documentation is thorough and the community is excellent.

I had my misgivings at first, as zimbra has everything and the kitchen
sink and getting everything to play nice with that level of complexity
is, shall we say, a significant effort indeed. But it has exceeded my
expectations.