Colin Charles Agenda

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

Sunday evening, I was in the data center. Hagrid had a failed sda in the RAID array, since post-Christmas (when I was on vacation), and I was going to replace it. Thanks to RAID1, it still kept humming along. Its almost impossible to find 120GB disks any longer, so I thought it would be time to upgrade to 2*500GB.

Monday, shone on me (smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sda):
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: FAILED!
Drive failure expected in less than 24 hours. SAVE ALL DATA.
See vendor-specific Attribute list for failed Attributes.

Again, sda was at it. A brand new, honking, 500GB SATA2 disk, failing. Power supply? Fubared motherboard? Now my thoughts of buying a Macbook or whatever new-fangled device Apple launches on January 15 at MacWorld, is clearly gone down the drain. I’m guessing a new server is in order. Well, at least it will be 64-bit, and every bit capable of running Xen.

In case anyone’s looking for a good reference to S.M.A.R.T. error messages, the Wikipedia entry on S.M.A.R.T. is pretty good.

Technorati Tags: raid1, s.m.a.r.t., failing disks

Was hardware shopping yesterday, and couldn’t resist getting myself a webcam, now that Skype 2.0 on Linux supports it (okay, its beta, but it works). Picked up a Logitech QuickCam Family for RM65. There was a more expensive version (RM10 more) that was “Skype certified”, but I figured I could save the cash, seeing that there is no way Logitech supports Linux officially anyway.

Did it work with Linux? Most certainly, on Fedora 8, it just worked. Of course, you need the livna repository. Just install gspca (it’ll pull in some kernel modules too), and then run modprobe gspca, and voila! you have a working webcam. Tried it with Ekiga, it was detected. Tried it with Skype, and even had a chat, with a user on Windows, and it worked. Glad to be webcam enabled.

Technorati Tags: fedora, logitech, quickcam family, linux, skype, video, ekiga, gspca

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

I managed to get my old Vista image created on Ubuntu Gutsy, to see if it would run under KVM on Fedora 8. Turns out I get a similar blue screen of death. Looks like it might be the splash screen of Windows causing KVM/QEMU to bork. Decided that it might be time to try VirtualBox.

No Fedora 8 RPMS are provided, so the Fedora 7 RPM will have to suffice. First snag? Lacking kernel-devel (by default, you now get kernel and kernel-headers). After installing that, its a simple sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup. Ensure that the user you’re running as, is also a member of the group vboxusers (you have to do this manually).

Starting up innotek VirtualBox is now a breeze. Though I have a feeling I have to run the setup everytime I get a new kernel (which is a problem in Fedora land, as there’s a rapid pace of development). This feeling was confirmed quite quickly, as I had a new kernel release almost immediately from the time I trialled this to the time I wrote this. At first glance, its an ugly application (Qt based).

Setting up a VM requires no KVM support, so in Fedora, this means removing kvm_intel and kvm from the running kernel. Good thing they’re modules, eh?

Setting up Window Vista was a breeze. Allocating it 1GB of RAM on my 2GB machine, seemed OK, as long as Firefox with multiple tabs weren’t running. Vista does something quirky – it pre-allocates all the RAM, probably by writing zeroes, and thus makes use of 1GB of RAM even before it starts. Oh well. At least I have Windows, and it performs, relatively well, so I can test software.

Networking? Much has been written about this, in fact, there’s even a ticket #504 for this. In fact, it was easy – Devices -> Install Guest Additions. Then get Windows to probe for new hardware, and add the network card. Very simple, quite unlike my KVM experience. If you for some reason want to mount the image itself, its located at /usr/share/virtualbox/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso.

Technorati Tags: virtualbox, windows, linux, fedora, fedora 8, vista