Colin Charles Agenda

Illegal downloading
It seems like March has clearly become a dark time for illegal downloaders. With Exetel in Australia willing to disconnect offenders, following on what seems to have started on in Japan and Sweden (where the ISPs can give to the courts, information on suspected file sharers). The United Kingdom is not far off. Encrypted P2P would seem like the way to go, along with port randomisation, and maybe even using tunnels?

Bloggers to pay a more important role in Malaysia?
It seems that the newly appointed information minister, Ahmad Shabery Cheek, wants to have a meeting with bloggers, as they play a role in nation building! They surely played a role in brining down the coalition. The important thing is that they’ve realised that they, the government of the day, will not control bloggers. Nothing to realise really, that’s what the MSC Bill of Guarantees provides: “7. Ensure no Internet censorship.”

Zimbra, and quality
Upgrading Zimbra has scared me in the past. This time, another problem cropped up with the ill-fated 5.0.3 release, which was pulled almost immediately. Good thing 5.0.4 has also been released. I cannot wait to have “online backup” in the open source version.

Bloggers feel more connected?
Recent research in Melbourne show that bloggers feel happier and more satisfied with their friends. Swinburne University studied new bloggers, and found that within two months, bloggers felt more socially connected, and generally felt part of a community. However, its not all bells and whistles – bloggers might also be more psychologically distressed? Or maybe, they’re just MySpace bloggers ;)

You weren’t meant to have a boss
Paul Graham tells us that having a boss, isn’t the natural scheme of things. Reading the sub-heading, on Trees, definitely makes a lot of sense. A bold statement, yet true: “You can feel the difference between working for a company with 100 employees and one with 10,000, even if your group has only 10 people.” I can already say I can feel myself resonating with it. As always, a good piece of advice: “A lot of people in their early twenties get into debt, because their expenses grow even faster than the salary that seemed so high when they left school. At least if you start a startup and fail your net worth will be zero rather than negative.”

Technorati Tags: illegal downloading, p2p, bloggers, internet censorship, zimbra, quality, social, community, boss, startups

One thing I’ve found limiting in Zimbra, is the fact that the hot backup is only available in the Network Edition (which costs money). I remember the pain in upgrading Zimbra, and it would have been great if there was a hot backup with an easy restore feature.

Now, they’re talking about voting for Hot Backups to be in the FOSS product. I suggest everyone using Zimbra, or thinking about using Zimbra, to write on the forum, or alternatively email them, so that hot backups make it into the Zimbra OSS edition. Trust me, it will come in handy when you’re upgrading.

Technorati Tags: zimbra, hot backups, oss edition, vote

If CentOS (and by the same vein, Oracle Enterprise Linux) claims compatibility with RHEL, why is Zimbra saying that the issue with ZCS 5.0, Scalar::Util, and Perl, is caused by CentOS?

QA’ing against RHEL, and not CentOS is expected, but saying there’s no compatibility between CentOS and RHEL, sounds like a bit of a fib, don’t you think?

Even better, the recommendation to use Ubuntu. Will there be a LTS release, at some stage soon? It looks like Canonical are behind schedule for another LTS release…

Technorati Tags: zimbra, zimbra collaboration suite, zcs, zcs5, qa, scalar:util, centos, perl, compatibility, rhel

I took the opportunity today evening to get myself upgraded (from 4.5.3_GA_733) to the latest (5.0.0_GA_1869) open source version of Zimbra - ZCS 5.0 GA. The database migration took about the longest, mainly due to some schema changes. Lots of starts and stops to the database. Its now running MySQL 5.0.45 Community.

What prompted the upgrade? A few days ago, I got a bunch of new packages, and rebooted the server (new kernel). To my dismay, Zimbra started to have issues - amavisd wouldn’t start. This meant that there was a large amount of mail, sitting in the queue, not being delivered. Things you don’t normally check for, immediately, anyway.

Turns out Compress::Zlib was too old. Well, not the system provided Compress::Zlib, but the Zimbra provided Compress::Zlib. Kind of annoying when there are two packages of software, sitting on your system, right? However, the benefits of having an easy-to-administer and use mail system, somehow I think outstrips all the pain associated.

I found the web interface in ZCS 4.5.3 to be a bit limited, even when logged in as an administrator. There was absolutely no way to restart, failed services. For this, I actually needed to login via SSH, and use zmcontrol. Running SSH on a non-standard port, and not having your laptop nearby (or remembering the non-standard port) can allow you to have some fun :)

So after fixing ZCS 4.5.3, and realising that it had some gaping holes, I decided to upgrade. The upgrade process went on pretty smoothly, till I saw:
Updating from 5.0.0_RC3
5 is only avaliable with the XS version at /opt/zimbra/zimbramon/lib/IO/Socket/SSL.pm line 30
BEGIN failed–compilation aborted at /opt/zimbra/zimbramon/lib/IO/Socket/SSL.pm line 30, <DBCONFIG> line 21.
Compilation failed in require at /opt/zimbra/zimbramon/lib/Net/LDAP.pm line 970, <DBCONFIG> line 21.

This has largely got to do with the RHEL4 supplied Perl, as referenced by zimbra bug #22466. However, it seems that it was fixed in 5.0.0_GA_1809. Problem still seems to be around in 5.0.0_GA_1869. Verified that it existed - /opt/zimbra/zimbramon/lib/i386-linux-thread-multi/Scalar/Util.pm (and was newer than the version on the system). Verified that Zimbra saw it too - check out .bashrc in /opt/zimbra (the home directory for the zimbra user) for the various PATHs that Zimbra sees/requires. However, I was running this install, not as the zimbra user, so the Perl PATHs had to be specified.

Specifying the Perl PATH, also didn’t help. The forums mentioned just installing from cpan, Scalar::Util and letting the install progress. It still failed.

I thought I’d try a clean install. By golly, it failed on RHEL4. An upgrade of a clean install from ZCS 4.5.10 also failed. I’m almost convinced that Zimbra spent very little time QA’ing ZCS on RHEL4. Sure, RHEL5 probably works a charm, but the drive of enterprise software is not upgrading the OS too often. This is where I can so see, FreeBSD succeeding - pity there isn’t an official Zimbra/FreeBSD port.

For fun reading, check out their forums: [SOLVED] Big Fubar on 5 FOSS GA Upgrade (how was it solved?), Upgrade 4.5.7 -> 5.0 GA Failed, centos4 upgrade to 5.0 errors. I’m sure this magical list can go on and on. All purported solutions generally, do not work.

Moral of the story? Even with backups, don’t try upgrading Zimbra on a production box. Be prepared to cry, a lot.

Technorati Tags: zimbra, zimbra collaboration suite, zcs, zcs5, qa, ga, upgrades

Its exciting to see Zimbra being purchased for USD$350 million, by Yahoo!. Exciting because its a great product, exciting because I use it daily, and I guess Satish & team (of over 100 employees) deserve a big pat on the back. The other exciting thing to note is that its got MySQL in its core, and if they’re pushing it out farther and wider now thanks to the Yahoo! purchase, all the better.

There are a few things that are unclear, though, even from their FAQ:

• They mention commitment to Zimbra 5, but I’m still waiting for 4.5.7 :P (My Series 60 phone still hates IMAP via Zimbra).
• Will we see, say the AdSense Zimlet (only available in network, at the moment), disappear?
• Will they hurt the community by attempting to over-commercialise Zimbra? Compiling Zimbra from source control isn’t the easiest process, because of the dependency list, so I do hope they don’t run away from their amazing “easy” install process

I guess its good to know that they’re in the Communications & Community team. Yahoo! has a tendency to buy things and kill it in the past as well. Anyone remember Geocities? They were a better MySpace, any day. Lets hope Brad Garlinghouse ensures Zimbra stays committed to delivering their product, and remain relevant (today, I don’t see any better software for ease-of-use and integration available out there in the open source world). Again, congratulations to Yahoo! on acquiring a great company, and here’s me tipping my hat for their betterment in the future.

– a loyal Zimbra fan.

Technorati Tags: zimbra yahoo! acquisition

I’ve been a big supporter of Zimbra, because I think they’re one of the few projects/companies that get email/calendering/a groupware solution, right. Sure, I don’t necessarily like the model where they cripple the open source version in terms of say, backups (but this I guess will be fixed when MySQL supports online backups natively). No AdSense zimlet? Its easy enough to write one (with spare time).

What’s annoyed me of late with Zimbra, is its lack of ability to work with my Nokia E61i. Its a known problem (since February this year?), as it also affected the E61 (and probably other Series 60 phones, when you’re trying to access the Zimbra server over IMAP). You get the certificate being displayed, you get the headers, and when you try to open any email bodies, it just stops working.

The target for this fix, seems to be Zimbra 5, and according to their roadmap, we should see it in Q3/2007. The betas are already out, though I’m not about to load it on a production system. Watch zimbra#14850 - Nokia E61 sync with imaps if this affects you. There’s also a reference forum post. And here’s hoping to a good release, this quarter (2 more months to go!).

Technorati Tags: zimbra, zimbra collaboration suite, zcs, bug, nokia e61i, sybmian, series 60, imaps, email

Zimbra is truly the answer to the open source mail+calendering+contact management application. I have been playing around, and more recently using in production, the Zimbra Collaboration Suite, and all I can say is that it’s darn impressive.

While evaluating, I was always worried about the upgrade process - it seemed like pain for some software you run out of an ./install.sh script, that has its own versions of a web server, LDAP, database, and so on. In fact, reading the Single Server installation guide states:

Important. You cannot have any other web server, database, LDAP, or MTA server running, when you install the Zimbra software. If you have installed any of the applications, before you install Zimbra software, disable these applications.

However, this is fully configurable during the setup process - run it at another port besides port 80, and you’ve got the usage of Apache again. This might I add, even works for upgrades - it saves the configuration rather sensibly. It doesn’t recognize CentOS officially, and that might be something they should fix in the Community edition. A Zimbra appliance (on Ubuntu Server?) might be really cool - think about the possibilities of collaboration in a box.

As with anything, there are complaints. No live backup, unless you buy the Network edition? Though the promising thread means that people are interested in prodding this further (I know, I am). Backups are horrendous - stop the server, copy /opt/zimbra, then restart. /opt/zimbra is large. mailx seems to not be so sensible in working, any longer, which means logwatch doesn’t get emails out to the root user.

Today, I also decided to give Zimbra Desktop a twirl. They have installers for Windows, OS X and Linux. It installed fine on Fedora Core 6 (i.e. for its java requirements, gcj must’ve sufficed. UPDATE: They have their own, shipped, JRE.). At version 0.36, upon asking it to start, it does ask for the location of my web browser, which seems a little daft. When I send it to the path that Firefox has, it automatically shuts the installer down, making me think it might have crashed (actually, moving to the workspace with Firefox installed, shows that the desktop account manager configuration has started!). Lo and behold, at localhost:7633, Zimbra starts syncing everything and I’ve got my mail locally! I don’t need to use Thunderbird for mail, or Evolution for calendering - the Zimbra Desktop just brings it all right to me, in my browser, even when I’m offline.

The Zimbra Desktop is your exact Zimbra online experience, delivered to you offline. It performs a sync at 60 seconds by default, and you get the full experience of the client, in your web browser. Cross browser, cross platform, similarity. They mention they’ve not got a price yet for this, but if I were them, I’d not charge for it - the client, really, needs to be free for mass adoption (and of course work with the Community and Network Editions). Of course, the differentiation can come from things like attachment searches/HTML rendering, rebranding, support, and so forth. But email in your web browser that syncs with the online server, that in itself should be free - no crippling necessary.

Technorati Tags: zimbra, zimbra desktop, zimbra collaboration suite, zcs, backup