It’s truly amazing how excited people get over Zimbra – so thought we’d share some of the ways people show it.
We were pleasantly surprised a few days ago when a school declared a ‘national Zimbra day’ and sent us pictures of cupcakes (that we can virtually enjoy). Why the baked goods? They recently rolled out ZCS and love it. Since we are also launching 5.0.9 today it’s fitting.
As the summer is the perfect time for schools to do system upgrades when students aren’t around,
Thunder04’s organization had a conversion party while they worked on their switchover – with some delicious goodies of course.
The
Menlo Park City School District (which serves Menlo Park & Atherton in California) would like to wish you all a “Happy Zimbra Conversion or Upgrade Day” as ZCS 5.0.9 has
just been released! (This version includes additional beta builds for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS in both x86 & 64-bit as well.)
Continuing our earlier advice to take backups frequently, and secure them offsite – thought we’d highlight a few recent administrator related things added to ZCS that you might not have noticed.
Network Edition Backup Enhancements
Speaking of backups, there are some new ways to take them in ZCS 5.0.x. With ever larger quota usage, full backups can often take a while to run, and even incrementals which process the redologs may still be one heck of a job when you’re talking thousands or millions of accounts. Having trouble completing that entire full backup during off-hours? Enter the hybrid auto-grouped mode, which combines the concept of full and incremental backup functions – you’re completely backing up a target number of accounts daily rather than running incremental sessions. As a plus it automatically pulls in the redologs since the last run so you get incremental backups of the remaining accounts; although the incremental accounts captured via the redologs are not listed specifically in the backup account list. Think of auto-grouped mode as a full backup for the scheduled group as well as an incremental (via redologs) for the all other accounts at the same time. This allows you to do a point in time restore for any account. Simply divide your total accounts by the number of groups you choose (zimbraBackupAutoGroupedNumGroups is 7 by default) and that’s how many will get a full backup session each night. Newly provisioned accounts, and accounts whose last backup is a specified number of days older are picked first. (zimbraBackupAutoGroupedInterval is defaulted to 1d)
To save space, and therefore store older backups longer or run them more frequently, you can also auto-compress them with the –zip argument. This isn’t new, but it got improved handling of shared blobs in 5.0.5 as well as a -zipStore mode for speed. You can also adjust the buffer & queue capacity of the backup process, as well as additional options like the level of compression, or the number of archives per person via the backup_zip_copier_private_blob_zips localconfig attribute. Of course you lose the hard linking optimization (speed and space) for blobs that are in an earlier full backup already when working from the same disk – so it’s more advantageous for those off-site single-copies (you do make one often right?). However, there are legitimate uses for running it on your normal backups: Fewer files make it easier to copy or rsync later, and prevents you from running out of inodes. You can also easily delete individual backups rather than running zmbackup -del, and therefore keep just a few really old backups around for whatever compliance reasons you may have.
By-the-way, ZCS 5.0.6 added the ability to easily replay redologs from an arbitrary point in time with zmplayredo should you be in a unique situation that needs it. (Say you’ve been taking snapshot backups and but then need to restore, and you’ve also saved all the redologs since the snapshot. Or you take a snapshot, then manually copy redologs from the live system to bring the snapshot copy up to current. This allows you to force replay of them all and not just the uncommitted transactions.)
We’ve always recommended that: “After upgrade, you should run a full backup immediately as changes in this release invalidate all old backups.” It’s still good advice to have a fresh full, but there’s always the infrequent need to get data from an older minor version backup without throwing up a temporary machine. Well, with 5.0.x we aimed to make restores compatible across patch releases (i.e. an older 5.0.x backup, not a prior 4.5.x backup – major version restore is this RFE). There was a bug about zmrestore not handling database schema changes, but that’s fixed in 5.0.5 and later – so backwards compatibility for restore is now theoretically possible. And we’re also looking to put icing on the cake by adding a conversion tool to upgrade backups themselves to allow restore on later ZCS versions.
You can find help on backups via Support Channels, over in the Community Forums, or ask us a question on them below. Stay tuned, as Part 2 will cover tidbits for all editions.
Linux users have pondered: “Wouldn’t it be nice to just grab Zimbra software via repositories?”
There was just so much positive feedback over Zimbra Desktop Beta 3 (with over 900 new members to the forums last month!) we thought that Ubuntu 32-bit users should be able to grab it easily. (64-bit support is coming soon)
This brings Zimbra Desktop’s easy setup against ZCS, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, AOL and any other IMAP/POP accounts to the huge Ubuntu community – letting them take mail, contacts, calendars, tasks, documents, and briefcase items offline and sync whatever actions they may take when they’re reconnected.
To install:
sudo synaptic (As you’re read this it’s being added to Applications > Add/Remove.)
Enable the third party packages in settings > repositories.
Reload, search for “Zimbra”, and away you go. (same as a sudo apt-get install zdesktop)
Once downloaded, start via Applications > Internet:
Many thanks to the Canonical Team for showcasing us on their frontpage:
ubuntu.com/news/zimbra-desktop
Not using Ubuntu? It’s cross-platform for other Linux variants, as well as Windows and Mac –
grab it here.
You may ask: “What about the entirety of the
Zimbra Collaboration Suite Server in Ubuntu or other repositories?” We can’t say one way or the other at this point – but think of this as a harmonious step.
Find help for Zimbra Desktop over in the Community Forums, ask us a question below, or fill out the Ubuntu registration/feedback on it: ubuntu.com/register/zimbra/
