Headless installation on amazon cloud instance questions...

ecommunities · Post by **ecommunities** » Thu Apr 11, 2013 11:13 am

I'm preparing to move to Amazon (via RightScale) from our existing infrastructure which in short is Plesk. I'm just starting to play around with the Zimbra Open Source installer and I've got a couple questions to start...
1. First, I've used wget to get started, just wondering if there's a YUM archive I could be using instead?

2. Since this is going to be a headless install, are there command line options available to "auto-accept" the license questions, and further (I'm stuck at this point due to an issue with our /etc/hosts) if there are further questions during installation, how can I provide input values to them?
Thanks to anyone that can lend a hand here.
Kevin.

lytledd · Post by **lytledd** » Fri Apr 12, 2013 9:31 am

A headless install means that there is no monitor.
You can still install Zimbra via ssh. The installer is texted based and will work just fine. All of my Zimbra installs are headless.
But, to show what command line options the installer supports you can run:
./install.sh --help
Doug

ecommunities · Post by **ecommunities** » Fri Apr 12, 2013 10:53 am

Thanks for your response Doug, much appreciated.
First, WRT to "Headless Install", I was aware what a headless install was, just put it in there so anyone reviewing was clear that I was doing this via SSH at the command line... less confusion = better answers

Thanks for the "--help" reference, duh, should have figured that. That said, amongst the various "Skip..." options, I don't see one that would skip the first (two, since it seems to be asked twice) questions: "Do you agree with the terms of the software license agreement? [N]".
I'm going to be writing either a "RightScript" or Chef script to automate the install of Zimbra, storing the persistent content like mail and accounts on an EBS volume so we can cycle the server when needed and not have to worry about manual interference. So I need to be able to force the installer to skip questions like this. It's unclear in the help if this is something I can include in a "defaultsfile", do you happen to know if there's a reference for this? I'm going to go do my own search, but for the benefit of others in my situation, let's get it up here if possible.
Thanks again!

ecommunities · Post by **ecommunities** » Fri Apr 12, 2013 11:00 am

I've found the following thread here in the forums with the example 'defaultsfile' contents:
But">http://www.zimbra.com/forums/installati ... ended.html
But I still don't see anything that would indicate skipping the license agreement question? I'll keep looking...

ecommunities · Post by **ecommunities** » Fri Apr 12, 2013 11:52 am

Although not very obvious, it seems that using a defaultsfile at all skips that question, now onto the next install error...

16113Chewie71 · Post by **16113Chewie71** » Tue May 14, 2013 10:54 pm

ecommunities
Did you come up with a Chef recipe to install Zimbra with a "defaultsfile"? I'm curious because I'm building up the same thing now and that's about the only thing I don't have automated except for provisioning the vm with a VMDK for /opt/zimbra.
Matt

ecommunities · Post by **ecommunities** » Thu Jun 06, 2013 4:27 am

Hey Matt, I'm using RightScale's platform so I've got bash scripts at my disposal when creating my server templates, not entirely familiar with all that Chef offers but if you can, here's the script I crafted, there's use of some environment variables as well as a few of my own that I use with RightScale's platform but you'll get the idea anyhow. A previous script downloads a copy of Zimbra I designate into the /tmp dir which is where this one starts, nothing magical going on

Hope it helps.
#!/bin/bash

#

# Description: Reboot safe Zimbra CS Installer

#

# Test for a reboot, if this is a reboot just skip this script.

#

if test "$RS_REBOOT" = "true" ; then

echo "Skip Zimbra Install on reboot."

logger -t zimbra::install "Skip Zimbra Install on reboot."

exit 0

fi
#

# This portion of the RightScript runs only on first Launch boot.

#

# TODO: Update settings to exclude anything relating to setting up new domains, since the

# attachment of an EC2 EBS Volume and restoration of the account DB will re-establish

# all required domains.

#
cd /tmp/zcs*
cat >> ./zimbra.defaults <
AVUSER=admin@$ZIMBRA_FQDN

CREATEADMIN=admin@$ZIMBRA_FQDN

CREATEDOMAIN=$ZIMBRA_FQDN

DOCREATEADMIN=yes

DOCREATEDOMAIN=yes

DOTRAINSA=yes

ENABLEDEFAULTBACKUP=yes

EXPANDMENU=no

HOSTNAME=$ZIMBRA_FQDN

JAVAHOME=/opt/zimbra/java

LDAPHOST=$ZIMBRA_FQDN

MODE=https

MTAAUTHHOST=$ZIMBRA_FQDN

NOTEBOOKACCOUNT=wiki@$ZIMBRA_FQDN

UPGRADE=no

REMOVE=no

RUNAV=yes

RUNSA=yes

SMTPDEST=admin@$ZIMBRA_FQDN

SMTPHOST=$ZIMBRA_FQDN

SMTPNOTIFY=yes

SMTPSOURCE=admin@$ZIMBRA_FQDN

SNMPNOTIFY=yes

SNMPTRAPHOST=$ZIMBRA_FQDN

SPELLURL=http://$ZIMBRA_FQDN:7780/aspell.php

STARTSERVERS=yes

TRAINSAHAM=ham@$ZIMBRA_FQDN

TRAINSASPAM=spam@$ZIMBRA_FQDN

USEIMAPPROXY=no

USESPELL=yes

INSTALL_PACKAGES="zimbra-core zimbra-apache zimbra-ldap zimbra-logger zimbra-mta zimbra-snmp zimbra-spell zimbra-store zimbra-archiving zimbra-proxy"

CREATEADMINPASS=$ZIMBRA_ADMIN_PASSWORD

SQLROOTPASS=$DBADMIN_PASSWORD

LDAPREPPASS=$ZIMBRA_ADMIN_PASSWORD

LDAPPOSTPASS=$ZIMBRA_ADMIN_PASSWORD

LDAPAMAVISPASS=$ZIMBRA_ADMIN_PASSWORD

LDAPROOTPASS=$ZIMBRA_ADMIN_PASSWORD

LDAPADMINPASS=$ZIMBRA_ADMIN_PASSWORD

EOF
./install.sh zimbra.defaults
exit 0