Zimbra Port

[Paul Pathiakis]

Chris,

I dug into it hard just a few days ago.

Here's their issues:

Like most people who are "solely" Linux (I'm not solely anything, 25+ years in sysadmin, architecture, internet engineering, etc.), they don't understand where /opt came from and what its true, original purpose was.  (Additional OS enhancement software - directory was created circa 1990).  Most of the linux world believes that all additional software goes into /opt.

Happily, we have nullfs but more happily, ZFS.

ZFS creating /opt/zimbra or creating a zpool and zfs'ing it, whatever, solves this issue.  (In other words, poor use of auto-configuration tools and make variables that allow you to define a DESTDIR instead of hardcoding it.)  Performing a softlink or other things causes the install to totally blow up.

They guy who did the attempt at FreeBSD installation, did a decent job at figuring this out.  Everything, performing his procedure works as almost as directed.  

Things that are not to be liked about it:

He builds specific packages for the install and bundles them up with the install.
He creates three packages for the install, the builddeps, rundeps and source.
He then almost forces you to use these packages and his 'blessed ports packages" that he created to get it to install correctly instead of just using ports.

After all this is installed with pkg_add (I couldn't find any indication of pkgng work) The supporting software is installed and ready to go.

Now, you get to the Zimbra source.  (All 3 software bundles are tar'd and gzip'd)  Once the ZCS is unpacked, you run install.sh in its root directory and away it goes.  

Once you get by some very strange errors (DNS not configured but it was, you have to force it to be your domain, and some other strangeness), you work out those few issues and find no errors in the install log(s).  Awesome....

The last part of it is the thing starts up and integrates everything....  (This is something truly impressive:  Apache, OpenSSL (certs get gen'd) , LDAP, MySqeel, Postfix, all the spam, virus, etc packages that go with a mail system, and on and on.....  It then tells me everything is running and I have to connect to https://<host>:7071..... it just hangs at that point....  *shrug*  

I've tried debugging it and I've tried over 10 times of going over possible errors.  Nothing.  I tried contacting the author but there seems to be an access issue.

I'll try again soon, however, my company is being built right now....  so I have VERY, VERY LIMITED time.  (Yes, it's PC-BSD and FreeBSD based)  I was hoping to have a full collaboration suite for MS exchange and Outlook drop-in replacement and this looked very promising.  *sigh*

P.




________________________________
 From: Chris Rees <crees at FreeBSD.org>
To: Paul Pathiakis <pathiaki2 at yahoo.com> 
Cc: "ports at freebsd.org" <ports at freebsd.org> 
Sent: Friday, February 8, 2013 2:23 PM
Subject: Re: Zimbra Port
 
On 29 January 2013 15:22, Paul Pathiakis <pathiaki2 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> It looks like they are soooo close here.  Can't ports pick this up and put it in the collection?
>
> http://wiki.zimbra.com/wiki/Zimbra_on_FreeBSD
>
> If you look at the Zimbra site for threads there are quite few with people asking for Zimbra on FreeBSD.

At a glance it's a little less trivial than "picking it up and putting
it in the collection" :)

It probably wouldn't be too difficult, but someone would need to make
a tarball of the sources available, which may have licensing issues...
perhaps you could ask the author how he made the packages?

Chris