Rob Thompson rob.sun3.org

Article Categories:

• Home
• PHP Code (4)
• Oracle (1)
• Misc (11)

New Articles:

• More on High Resolution Security Cameras
• Bash Shell: Find Nano or Pico
• Zimbra on a VPS: Tuning
• Zimbra on a VPS: Step-by-Step
• Zimbra: It's Going Places
• Threaded Discussion Site Widget
• Scripts as Reliable Daemons
• Switch vs. If
• Zimbra
• Universities and Email Outsourcing
• High Resolution Security Cameras
• Multiple User Apache Setups
• PHP and Solaris: getcwd() Behavior
• Wapache - Win GUI Framework
• SetGID and SetUID Shell Scripts
• Multipart Mime Headers in PHP
• Parallelizing RSYNC Processes
• Oracle Tree Relationships
• PHP: Find Ophaned Files

Contact:

New comments:

• Rob (Hi Christina, Here...)
• Christina (Hello Rob, Th...)
• Mike Whitton (Hi Rob, how d...)
• Rob (Hi SpinState, I just p...)
• SpinState (Looking forward...)
• gwb (This worked fine for m...)
• Shane (I'm having a hard ti...)
• Robert (what bugs me about...)
• Josh Johnston (Micro optimi...)
• Unomi (I've done a lot of b...)
• Matt Parrott (Thank you. T...)
• ApeHanger (> case($a = 0): ...)
• Marc Gear (Don't forget tha...)
• leo (Interesting test! But...)
• Rob Thompson (Hi Phil, than...)
• Phil Davis (I've wished for...)
• Adam (I've never heard of Z...)
• open source cms (It's work...)
• open source cms (Funny prob...)

Various Scripts

Various PHP & Related Scripts



Photo Gallery

My Photo Gallery




Links

Oracle Corporation
planet-php.net
produx.org
robsort.org
The Saab Network (TSN)
Thread Buddy
Technorati Profile
Wayne State University
muskr.at

Zimbra on a VPS: Step-by-Step

Here is a step-by-step how-to for getting Zimbra Collaboration Suite installed on a XEN-based virtual machine/virtual private server running on Linux with limited resources. I am going to use a hosted VPS from Linode for this example. Based on the forum discussions at Zimbra.com, depending on the setup, running Zimbra on a VPS/VM can sometimes cause problems, especially with libc calls. But, this setup seems to have worked fine for me for about 5 months so far and I figured I share.

BTW: I have no relation to Zimbra/Yahoo. So, it should be noted that neither Zimbra or myself directly support Zimbra in the open source variety. In short: I hope this helps, and good luck!

Pre-Installation Checklist

 • $30
 • A few hours
 • Some familiarity with UNIX
 • A domain name, for which you have control of an 'A' and MX DNS record.

Step 1: Set your DNS forward records

Before getting too into the VM setup, you will need to establish a domain name to use both as your web front-end and as your mail delivery host (MX). First, modify a forward DNS record for your domain to point toward your Linode IP. This step is accomplished at the site of whoever either manages your DNS or at the DNS server that serves your domain name. This forward DNS record will become the DNS name of your Zimbra front-end. The A record can be anything you like, such as mail.mydomain.com. Create an 'A' DNS record for your domain to point toward the IP address of your new Linode. Then, also modify the MX record for your domain to also point toward this IP. Point your MX record toward the name you chose for the A record. I.e. A=mail.mydomain.com=[your linode ip], MX=mail.mydomain.com.

In this example, I have used the domain name 'mail.develo.com' for both my 'A' and 'MX' DNS records.

Step 2: Setting up your Linode

The Linode 540 seems to be sized just right for a minimum install. Once you have completed the VPS purchase, and have a login to the linode site, you should see a screen in your account called 'dashboard' that looks like:



Select a Debian 4.0 distribution, then provision your disk so that you have a 1000MB swap, and use the rest for the main root partition. Zimbra will certainly eat all of your 540MB of ram (even with scaling down) and may potentially eat up some swap space too, so it is good to have this a bit big. Next set the password that will be become your root password.



Wait for your installation to be built (a few minutes), then click 'Boot'

Step 3: Set a reverse DNS pointer for your new IP

In the Linode 'members' area, there is a tab called 'utilities'. Click on the reverse DNS manager and put in the host name that matches your A/MX record that you set above. The linode.com site needs to see a forward record that is pointing to your IP for this step to work, so it may take a while for your DNS changes made above to propagate and for the Linode to pick up the changes. Until the forward DNS changes are viewable by the Linode.com DNS servers, Linode will not allow you to complete this step.

Step 4: Connect to your Linode

Now connect to your Linode IP address using an SSH client. If you do not have an SSH client, here is a good one for Windows:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

Connect as user 'root', using the password that you specified while creating your Debian distribution.

Step 5: Change your Linode hostname

After you are connected via SSH, the first order of business will be to change the hostname to match your DNS record, here, I'm using the example domain 'mail.develo.com'. To change your host name, simple do the 2 command below. The first writes the name of the machine to a file, the second sets the name.

Step 6: Reboot your Linode

Now, let's reboot the Linode to verify that the hostname change is in-place at boot-up. You may need to go back to your linode.com dashboard to start your linode if it does not come back automatically.

Step 7: Update your package sources

Update your Debian package sources with the command 'apt-get update'

Step 8: Upgrade your packages

This command will upgrade your Linux distribution to have current versions of all libraries and programs. You may be asked to restart a few daemons such as ssh, continue with the defaults if asked.

Step 9: Install packages required by Zimbra

Install these packages (with libc6-xen last) using the apt-get command as follows:

Step 10: Stop the default Debian email daemon

The Debian package at Linode.com comes with a default email daemon (exim). This runs by default and will conflict with Zimbra unless disabled before installation. To disable exim, comment out the the line that starts with 'smtp' in /etc/inetd.conf using an editor such as vi or pico (i.e.: 'pico -w /etc/inetd.conf'). Now, restart the inetd daemon by issuing the command below:

Step 11: Download Zimbra to your Linode

Find the HTTP link for 'Debian 4 x86' version of Open Source Zimbra at: http://www.zimbra.com/community/downloads.html. Save the link location, SSH into your Linode as root and use wget to grab the distribution using the link that you copied. Then 'gunzip' the distribution and 'untar' the tarball as shown.

Step 12: Start the installer

The Zimbra installer is very easy, but has alot of output, so I've only included the steps that require input:

Step 13: Congrats!: Zimbra should now be running!

http://yourdomain.com



To get to the administration URL goto:
https://yourdomain.com:7071

There are tons of great people and lots of reference material here: http://www.zimbra.com/forums/

Next see: Zimbra on a VPS: Tuning to reduce the memory footprint consumed by your Zimbra install

04/16/2008 09:10am

• RSS Articles
• RSS Pages
• RSS Comments
• RSS Comments for this article

Barbecued by sNews · Login