Zimbra 9 - FOSS

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alex70
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Re: Zimbra 9 - FOSS

Post by alex70 »

Thanks indeed, Ian!
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rosch
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Re: Zimbra 9 - FOSS

Post by rosch »

Hi all,

I have some questions about the current most stable Zimbra & Ubuntu installation (8.0.9.GA.6191.UBUNTU10.64 so yes, indeed old stuff)
  • 1. Zimbra 8.8.15 with Ubuntu 20.04: not recommended since there is are official 8.8.15 binaries for 20.04, correct?

    2. there will never be official 20.04 FOSS binaries from Synacor, be it version 8.8 or 9, correct?

    3. Zimbra 9 from beezim.fr is NOT PRODUCTION READY according to their page.
    Latest Ubuntu is 18.04. The installation will add the Zimbra repository apt's sources.list.d folder, so you will get all security patches, correct?
Not really about the same subject, but what would be the best way of importing the data from my current 8.0.9 to 8.8.15 (or even 9)?

ps: I am pretty sure some of my questions have already been answered in other threads, but please bear with me, at least this thread can be seen as a recap of the current status of Zimbra 8 and 9 - FOSS.

Thanks in advance for your insight.
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ianw1974
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Re: Zimbra 9 - FOSS

Post by ianw1974 »

rosch wrote:Hi all,

I have some questions about the current most stable Zimbra & Ubuntu installation (8.0.9.GA.6191.UBUNTU10.64 so yes, indeed old stuff)
  • 1. Zimbra 8.8.15 with Ubuntu 20.04: not recommended since there is are official 8.8.15 binaries for 20.04, correct?

    2. there will never be official 20.04 FOSS binaries from Synacor, be it version 8.8 or 9, correct?

    3. Zimbra 9 from beezim.fr is NOT PRODUCTION READY according to their page.
    Latest Ubuntu is 18.04. The installation will add the Zimbra repository apt's sources.list.d folder, so you will get all security patches, correct?
Not really about the same subject, but what would be the best way of importing the data from my current 8.0.9 to 8.8.15 (or even 9)?

ps: I am pretty sure some of my questions have already been answered in other threads, but please bear with me, at least this thread can be seen as a recap of the current status of Zimbra 8 and 9 - FOSS.

Thanks in advance for your insight.
1. I doubt very much an Ubuntu 20.04 will be made for 8.8.15. Rather for 9.x and higher it is most likely to appear, but it won't appear for older releases.
2. As you can read in this thread, there won't be any more FOSS builds from Synacor for ANY version of Linux. 8.8.15 was packaged in September 2019 and no newer binaries have been released since then. Usually a release would have come every few months.
3. In theory yes, there should be security patches that are accessible from the Zimbra repositories.

Your last question relating to upgrading your existing installation you should open a separate topic for. It will mean a lot of upgrade steps for Ubuntu to migrate through from 10.04, 12.04, 14.04, 16.04 to 18.04 as well as on the way upgrading from 8.0.9, through all or some of the later 8.x releases to get to 8.8.15. It's not something that should be asked in this post as it's totally unrelated to Zimbra 9.
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Re: Zimbra 9 - FOSS

Post by rosch »

Thanks Ian for your answer.
ianw1974 wrote:
Your last question relating to upgrading your existing installation you should open a separate topic for. It will mean a lot of upgrade steps for Ubuntu to migrate through from 10.04, 12.04, 14.04, 16.04 to 18.04 as well as on the way upgrading from 8.0.9, through all or some of the later 8.x releases to get to 8.8.15. It's not something that should be asked in this post as it's totally unrelated to Zimbra 9.
I asked because ideally I would have migrated from 8.x to 9, that's how its related to Zimbra 9, but yes, you're right, a separate post is better.
I will definitely not go through 4 Ubuntu upgrades to finally make it to 18.04.
My current plan is to install 18.04 with 8.8.15 since it's the most stable version and I'll probably open a new thread about my migration.

Ubuntu 18.04 end of standard support is April 2023, so theoretically there is some time left to figure out the situation about Zimbra 9 - FOSS.
Will Zimbra 8.x get updates until then too?
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Re: Zimbra 9 - FOSS

Post by ianw1974 »

Yes, as far as I know Synacor will be supporting 8.8.15 up to EOL date.

If you aren't wishing to upgrade Ubuntu, then suggest you use imapsync to move the data from your old server to new one. You will have to configure Zimbra from scratch as a new server with your appropriate domain settings, create user accounts, etc. You won't be able to migrate your data any other way if you are not going to upgrade from 8.0.9 using the normal upgrade processes. So it will be quite a bit of manual work on your part especially if there are a lot of email accounts. If only a handful, then it would probably be a couple of hours work to put the new server together, and use imapsync to copy the data.
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Re: Zimbra 9 - FOSS

Post by JDunphy »

I am a little late to finally building a release but gave it a try today without much of an issue. I was initially stumped as the docker image, my own native development env and Ian's scripts all failed at the same place which was a PATH issue with my environment.

I took a look at Ian's 01-install-build-deps.sh and added this 'Or' clause so that RHEL8's builds such as Oracle linux 8 will also work. This might be more appropos now that CentOS 8 is EOL and can be converted in place via scripts like centos2ol.sh and others from Rocky Linux, etc.

Code: Select all

elif [ $DISTRIB_ID == "CentOS" -o $DISTRIB_ID == "OracleServer" ]
One thing to look out for with Network/commercial installs if this build is on the same machine... make sure your path doesn't include zimbra's installed java or you will pull a different version and get that annotate error for a missing class during the build and come to a stop. I saw that exact error a few pages back in this thread.

I also need to validate the install that the build created so that probably should be next task. After that, I need is to see what it's going to take to move an existing 8.8.15 network version in place to 9.0 or 8.8.15 OSS releases that one builds themselves and how future patches will/might work. My intention isn't to move off of the network version but I want to be prepared should EOL comes sooner than expected for Zimbra's commercial offering.

Jim
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Re: Zimbra 9 - FOSS

Post by ianw1974 »

Yep, the scripts I did mainly for what was generally supported by Zimbra in terms of distros. I have built fine on Rocky, but unfortunately it won't install. For some reason, Zimbra relies on the repositories being accessible, even though during install you have the question do you want to use the Zimbra repos or not. Even on a supported distribution, saying no to this will fail to install, since some of the Zimbra dependencies pulled from the repo are not included in the build. Which is a shame.
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Re: Zimbra 9 - FOSS

Post by JDunphy »

Thanks Ian,

That is disappointing. It is never easy with them.

I need to investigate why we are not building or pulling these packages ourselves given this is the published build process they want us to follow I believe. Still early days for me but I wanted to understand why the OSS community seemed to be halted after such a promising start. Zextras has a lot to lose if the OSS community goes away so I don't understand them either on this as they don't share anything that I can find on the build process. In another thread it was stated that zimbra is not publishing the patches. We need to document this process ourselves and find a way forward once we understand what the problem is that is preventing the builds and patch cycle.

Hopefully, they don't expect us to design a new build process, new patch system, and new installation approach (complete fork) vs encouraging the community to contribute and make the brand/platform more capable against competing platforms for everyone. That last statement feels like I am on a soap box so I will stop now. ;-)

Jim
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Re: Zimbra 9 - FOSS

Post by ianw1974 »

That'll probably explain why I never saw any updates each time I built - bit risky not releasing patches, it's almost forcing you to buy it or resign from it altogether. I hope that's not the case though, it's almost the same kind of attitude what Oracle did with MySQL by not immediately releasing newer versions. And OTRS not releasing the open-source version of their new release until 2 years later.

I've been using Zimbra since 5.x, but the way it is now, I'm more likely to resign from it completely. I've found cheaper alternatives without having to administer my own server anymore. It's sad, since a few of the other open source mail servers I've tried, just don't do it for me, and disappointed that the owners of Zimbra took this stance. But they do have a business to run, so can understand these decisions, even if I don't agree with it. It's almost like taking it closed-source and no longer releasing a free version for users.
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Re: Zimbra 9 - FOSS

Post by JDunphy »

They should be publishing the patches but were not it seemed from the employee post. Wanted to make it clear that it is most likely a mistake that crept into their process vs will no longer publish the patches.
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