zimbra

Things to do after migrating to Zimbra 8.8.x

As I recently handled a migration from Zimbra 8.7.11 to Zimbra 8.8.12, I’ve been running into things I think the Zimbra updater should handle by itself, and/or things that should be documented in a more practical way than they currently are. I’ll just keep updating this post with things I find and learn.

(The migration turned into an 18 hour job since we ran into a +1 year old problem where an Ubuntu upgrade form 14.04.LTS to 16.04.LTS more or less wipes your Zimbra setup and leaves it in a very sorry state. Fortunately, I managed to piece it back by hand.)

Zimbra Backup NG

The new and improved Zimbra Backup NG should be enabled IMHO. It does things a lot better than the previous version(s). In a number of places, Zimbra makes references to its improvements, and so on. They should probably include this instruction too:

To disable the “classic” (or “legacy”) backups, a simple

zmschedulebackup -F

(as the “zimbra” user) is all you need to execute. (You may want to hang on to your old backups until they’ve outlived their purpose though. This command only disables/removes the scheduled “legacy” backups.)

Forcing OutOfOffice response to always fire in Zimbra

We had a need to create an e-mail account in Zimbra that would always generate an automated response to incoming e-mails. So we activated the OutOfOffice functionality (or “Vacation Mode” as some people prefer to call it). This is great, and you do have some control from the ZWC (Zimbra Web Client) user interface.

The “problem” with the OOO functionality is that it is designed for human interaction. So, in an attempt to be somewhat “intelligent”, Zimbra will remember to whom it has sent an automated response message, and if a second message is received within nn time, it will not send another one. This makes sense, if I have sent an e-mail to John Doe, and Mr Doe is on vacation, I probably know this to be true even if I send him another message within a few hours or days. So I don’t want a second automated response.

We wanted it to send an automated response every time it received a message, zmprov to the rescue!

As the ‘zimbra’ user, from the CLI prompt, enter:

zmprov ma acct@tobemod.com zimbraPrefOutOfOfficeCacheDuration <value>

The default <value> in our installation was 7d, presumably that means seven days. So I set it to ‘1s’ and anyone sending e-mail to acct@tobemod.com now gets an automated response, even if they send several messages within a short period of time.

Removing stubborn account and/or account alias in Zimbra

Zimbra can sometimes be very stubborn when it comes to removing an account or an account alias either via the admin console or by using zmprov. That’s when LDAP access comes in handy. This may, or may not, help you:

# su - zimbra
$ source ~/bin/zmshutil 
$ zmsetvars
$ ldapdelete -r -x -H $ldap_master_url \
                   -D $zimbra_ldap_userdn 
                   -w $zimbra_ldap_password \
                   uid=theuid,ou=people,dc=zimbra,dc=DOMAIN,dc=com

Possible output may be:

ldap_search: No such object (32)
ldap_delete: No such object (32)
  matched DN: dc=com

You can see which matches have been made and what has been (or has not been) removed.