Here is a summary of this week’s conference call. A few brief reminders:
- Conference calls are every Tuesday and open to all using either the FreeConferenceCall.com VoIP app or via a dial-in number: https://www.freeconferencecall.com/wall/zetalliance
- Each week’s call agenda can be found at: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... jMuGGtIl7J
- Constructive feedback on these call summaries is always welcome.
Experiences with 8.8.15 Patch 21
Mark S. said that he recently installed 8.8.15 P21 and encountered no issues post-install. He also enabled TLS 1.3 support (originally introduced in P20), and removed some weak encryption ciphers from the default configuration. David M. said he also installed 8.8.15 P21 without any issues. John H. said the only known issue related to P21 occurs in very large Zimbra installations with 25+ mailbox servers when both ABQ ( https://zimbra.github.io/adminguide/lat ... bq_service ) and Zextras Cluster Management are enabled. Under these circumstances, a significant negative performance impact is incurred when a synchronization occurs between the Zimbra servers in a cluster, and is being investigated by Zimbra and Zextras. Randy L. said he has also seen a few posts in the Zimbra Forums (example: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=69530#p301307 ) where some are discussing problems with SpamAssassin not performing rules updates after an upgrade to either 8.8.15 P20/P21 or 9.0 P13/P14. According to the reports, this appears to be related to a regression bug introduced in SpamAssassin 3.4.5, that was initially included in 8.8.15 P20 and 9.0 P13 to address a high severity security vulnerability. The issue is reportedly fixed in SpamAssassin in 3.4.6, but has not yet been upgraded in Zimbra. P21 and P14 both ship with SpamAssassin 3.4.5.
Follow-Up: Purging Expired Mailbox Data From S3 Backups
Following up on the March 2nd ( viewtopic.php?f=9&t=69488#p301132 ) and April 16th Zeta Alliance calls, Matthew F. asked if Mark S. had tried running a mailbox purge on his backups in his Zimbra Centralized Storage ( https://zimbra.github.io/adminguide/lat ... ed-storage ) after installing 8.8.15 Patch 21, since it includes a fix for NG Backup for this issue. Mark S. said he did, and it unfortunately resulted in a Java heap dump, so he has a Zimbra Support case open to investigate.
Using NFS As A Target For Zimbra Backups
Noah P. said that he has some extra spinning hard drives that he is interested in using to setup NFS as a target for his Zimbra backups. He plans to keep SSDs in place for mailbox metadata, but wondered if NFS can cause any issues with NG backups, for example, if an NFS mount point unexpectedly becomes unavailable causing backups or the associated Zimbra services to hang. Randy L. said he commonly uses NFS with his NG backups in Zimbra and has not seen any issues. He said that in the case of an NFS mount point going offline unexpectedly, he thinks it will cause NG Backup to send some warning messages to the Zimbra administrator about slow or failing backups, but otherwise does not seem to crash any Zimbra services. He explained that one of the keys to this resiliency is to use the “setBackupVolume Local” command line switch in NG Backup ( https://docs.zextras.com/zextras-suite- ... on_nfsfuse ). Randy said he thinks the worst that might happen is that, in the event of an extended NFS unmount, Noah might need to use the “zxsuite backup doCoherencyCheck” command to clean-up. Matthew F. added that in the past he has used a trick where he uses a loopback device as a backup target on the mailbox server to speed up backups by 10-20x for metadata, but this only works if Noah does not use the real-time SmartScan feature.
Birthdates Offset By 24 Hours
Marc G. said he has noticed that dates entered in the birthday field for Zimbra contacts get offset by 24 hours when ActiveSync is used with a mailbox. To workaround the issue, he has resorted to adding birth dates to the Notes field for contacts instead. John H. said he recalled a similar issue back in 8.8.15 Patch 5, and said the solution at that time was to do a full re-synchronization of an affected ActiveSync device. John E. said he thinks the original issue had something to do with a time zone offset, but was not sure. Adriano asked if Marc is using only US based dates for birthdates, as he thinks it could also be related to differences in the US date format, as compared to the European date format. Marc said he is using the European date format in the birth date field and agreed that might be a contributing factor.
Randy Leiker
Skyway Networks, LLC