Re: Zimbra with Sun Directory, ... Solaris?

[Steve Hillman <hillman@sfu.ca>]

When I first started looking into Zimbra, my first instinct was to decouple all of the individual components and use my own - use Sendmail instead of Postfix, centralize the MySQL component into a larger Sparc server, etc.

Gradually, I let go of those instincts. It's really best to think of Zimbra as a turn-key delivered product. Just like you wouldn't try to remove an embedded SQL database from a product, you shouldn't try to remove anything from Zimbra's either - just use their API to update info inside of Zimbra and you'll be happy(er).

That said, it's possible to configure Zimbra to use an external directory as your Global Address Lookup. Although it'll have its oen LDAP directory internally, it won't use it for user address book completion, so you can enforce your own privacy policy around disclosing names, etc.

As for supporting Solaris in general, that's something we've been bugging them for for well over a year now. Getting it to run on Solaris isn't impossible, but supporting it on an ongoing basis is going to require some amount of resources on Zimbra's part. They're not likely to do that unless enough of us step up and yell loudly about it.  I still bemoan the lack of good performance analysis tools on Linux..

It might also be worth pointing out here that on Linux, while ext3 is a decent, reliable filesystem, it *does* by default enforce a full fsck of the volumes every n'th mount (30 by default?) or 'm' days (180?), so the developers clearly don't consider it bulletproof. I shudder to think how long a full fsck of a 20TB file system with 500,000,000 files on it would take. Why do I mention this? Because ZFS, which is moving to being the default filesystem on Solaris, has no such fsck requirement and has built-in checksumming (and correcting, if you have redundancy) of every block as it's written/read from disk. Seems like that would be a valuable feature on an email filesystem..


----- "Bill Moss" <bill.moss@nyu.edu> wrote:

> Not sure anyone would know but am interested in other .edu's
> thoughts:
> 
> Zimbra can authenticate against a Sun Directory, what keeps it from  
> supporting Sun Directory as its main LDAP store?
> Is the structure of Zimbra's schema (or objects) incompatible with Sun
>  
> Directory? If not, what other factors make Sun Directory
> unsupportable/ 
> impossible with Zimbra (is it wanting to have the whole thing OSS,  
> licensing, ..)?
> 
> What is likelihood for Zimbra to support Solaris?
> 
> I ask because I'm guessing we're not alone in having significant  
> infrastructure built around Sun Directory and Solaris Sparc. Adopting 
> 
> Zimbra (for us) would be a much easier prospect if Sun Directory,  
> Solaris, or ideally both, were supported.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Bill Moss
> ITS eServices

-- 
Steve Hillman                                IT Architect
hillman@sfu.ca                               IT Infrastructure
778-782-3960                                 Simon Fraser University