Re: Intro and wiki

[Adam Cody <ajcody@zimbra.com>]

Dmitry,

 I found this in bugzilla:

 http://bugzilla.zimbra.com/show_bug.cgi?id=12525

 There's one internal/private comment on it. The relevant part is:

 "The idea is to move towards relocatable packages, with the flexibility to store user data in customer designated areas (ie mount points).  At which point this user can choose to install in a location compliant to favorite OS or Standard. The other half of this is to publish chksums of the packages and verify them before installing."

 What I can do is include a reference to FHS on the server-planning page and reference the above rfe number. This way, if there's enough interest the rfe will see increased votes & comments.

 Maybe it would be worth wild to create a new RFE that will take --fhs-strict from the installer. This way zimbra gets installed from the start under that standard. I'm unsure if this would have a negative impact to some other items though - like the clustering setup. Don't think it straight forward and I'm sure there will be some debate on what exactly is a "strict FHS" layout.

 Thoughts?

Adam Cody

----- "Dmitry S. Makovey" <dmitry@athabascau.ca> wrote:

> Adam,
> 
> first of all I want to express my gratitude for your Wiki pages. They
> are very 
> valuable and give some ideas/perspective to certain details of
> deployments. I 
> reference them all the time myself :)
> 
> On November 14, 2008, Adam Cody wrote:
> > If anyone has reviewed what I started on personal server planning
> page
> > [http://wiki.zimbra.com/index.php?title=Ajcody-Notes-ServerPlanning]
> , they
> > probably think I'm nuts in trying to tackle something with that big
> of a
> > scope. I think it can be done, I think it's failure will be if it's
> only
> > comprised of my opiniona and experiences. So if anyone wants to chip
> in,
> > your more than welcome. I'll work with you in any manner to get
> your
> > thoughts on the page. Send me emails, IM's, or say you want to talk
> on the
> > phone - I know the actual act of "writing" can cause some unix
> admin's to
> > seek counseling. :)
> 
> ...now that you've mentioned user input... ;)
> 
> we are following FHS[1] standard for our deployments (or at least
> trying our 
> best to follow it). It would be nice to reflect on the possibilities
> of 
> mostly FHS-compliant Zimbra deploy. Here's what we've came up with so
> far:
> 
> /etc/opt/zimbra for configs
> /opt/zimbra - binaries
> /var/opt/zimbra - message store, OpenLDAP db, MySQL db's etc.
> /var/log/zimbra - logs
> 
> going by FHS standard (in our case) means deploying well-documented
> system as 
> its layout is consistant across the board. not to mention
> side-benefits of 
> using paranoid setups like mounting /opt read-only, /var as no-exec,
> and for 
> cases of uber-paranoia /etc as read-only. There are other benefits
> too: you 
> can tune each FS to the specific needs (different FS /or differently
> tuned 
> FS/ used for each generic case) which are consistent across the board
> 
> (again).
> 
> Another benefit of going with FHS-compliant deploy is that migrations
> are 
> fairly simple as it's easy to rip out configs (/etc) or data (/var) or
> logs 
> (/var/log) and copy/move it somplace else. It opens the door to
> possibility 
> of mounting volume with binaries on multiple machines that only have
> local 
> configs and data (not that we plan on it at the moment).
> 
> Above information would be yet another invaluable piece of information
> in your 
> Wiki space :)
> 
> References:
> [1] http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html
> 
> -- 
> Dmitry Makovey
> Web Systems Administrator
> Athabasca University
> (780) 675-6245