Posts Tagged ‘zimbra’

Installing Multiple Instances of Zimbra Desktop in Linux

Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop is almost reaching full release status, but it still has one limitation: only one installation on a machine is supported. The problem lies in the fact that Zimbra Desktop uses a Jetty server for the backend application and each instance is configured to use the same port. We can hack Zimbra Desktop by changing the port from the default to another port on the system and then add another installation. This hack worked on Ubuntu 8.10 and should work on any Linux distro. I tried it on my MacBook, but Zimbra Desktop put a directory in the /Applications folder that contained prism and the installer didn’t allow me to continue. I haven’t tried this on Windows, but I imagine it should work in a similar way.

Disclaimer: This hack is not in any way supported by Zimbra or by the author. I am not responsible if your Zimbra Desktop data becomes unusable. Please backup your Zimbra Desktop installation before beginning if you already have data in Zimbra Desktop. Also, this hack will most likely break upgrades and have to be re-applied. A working knowledge of some Linux shell is recommended. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s begin.

1. Install Zimbra Desktop as normal.
Download the installer from Zimbra’s website and install it as normal on the first user’s account. This is the user’s account that we will change the web server ports. Once Zimbra Desktop is installed, stop the Zimbra sync services from the command line:
~/zimbra/Zimbra Desktop/Zimbra Desktop stop

You can check that the services have actually been stopped by running:
ps aux | grep zimbra

2. Edit Jetty and Prism config files.
Open up a terminal window in Linux, ‘cd’ to the Zimbra Desktop directory (~/zimbra/Zimbra Desktop) and find all config files containing the port number:
grep -r 7633 * | grep -v logs

The output will display the file name followed by the line that contains “7633″ which is the default listening port for Zimbra Desktop. You can ignore any line that says “Binary file <filename> matches”. The following files should have been returned and will need to be edited:
conf/localconfig.xml
jetty/etc/jetty.xml
jetty/webapps/service/WEB-INF/web.xml
jetty/webapps/zimbra/js/Startup1_2_all.js
jetty/webapps/zimbra/js/NewWindow_2_all.js
jetty/webapps/zimbra/js/zimbraMail/core/ZmZimbraMail.js
Zimbra Desktop.webapp/webapp.ini

Open up each file with the editor of your choice and change the text “7633″ with “7634″ or some other port of your choosing. Just make sure they are all the same.

3. Start Zimbra Desktop again.
You can now start the instance for user:
~/zimbra/Zimbra Desktop/Zimbra Desktop start

If all config files have been changed, the Zimbra Desktop sync engine will start as normal. You can launch the client from the desktop shortcut, or you can connect using another browser. To get the URL to connect to, consult the file: ~/zimbra/Zimbra Desktop/Zimbra Desktop.webapp/webapp.ini and look for the line “uri=”. Otherwise, you will receive an error from Jetty saying that you are unauthorized. If you receive an error, be sure to check that all files have been changed by running the grep comand at the beginning of step 2.

4. Login as second user and install.
Login as the second user that you want to install Zimbra Desktop as. You will then be able to install Zimbra Desktop as normal.

5. Rinse and repeat.
You can stop at this point if you don’t have any other users or if you don’t plan on doing upgrades. I haven’t tested this with upgrades, but I imagine that an upgrade will return it to the normal ports. In which case the upgrade will fail and data loss could result. I would recommend repeating steps 1-3 and changing the port in step 3 to 7635 (or whatever port you should choose).

That’s it! You can now have multiple users with their own Zimbra Desktop instance on your computer. Again.. this how-to is a total hack and not supported by anyone, but it worked for me. Upgrades to the software will most likely break the setup and could result in data loss. Of course you’re already doing this, but be sure to run a backup before trying any upgrades to the software.

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Feb 7th, 2009

Zimbra Desktop Reaches RC Status

The Zimbra team has reeleased the release candidate 1 of Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop, an offline mail client that allows synchronization with several mail services. The client can connect to Zimbra servers, of course, but it can also ‘sync’ with Yahoo!, Google, Hotmail and AOL’s mail, contact, and calendar services as well as Microsoft Exchange servers and standard IMAP and POP servers as well. The release contains all the features for the 1.0 release and works on the “big three” operating systems, Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

One of the biggest strengths of the Zimbra platform is its extensions called zimlets. Zimlets integrate directly into the Zimbra interface and can interact with the user to integrate other systems. For instance, the flickr zimlet allows users to save photos sent as attachments right to their flickr account. The release comes a few days after Google just announced that it was working on an offline version of Gmail to allow users to access their emails, calendars, etc. even while not connected to the web.

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Filed under News : Comments (1) : Feb 4th, 2009

Migrating Mail and Contacts from Hotmail to Zimbra

For anyone wanting to switch their email address from a free hotmail account to a Zimbra mail account without losing any email the switch can be made quite easily. You’ll need a Windows installation and your Hotmail and Zimbra account info to get started. You can also find info on migrating out of Zimbra Desktop and into an IMAP server here.

Install and setup Windows Live Mail
Hotmail does not offer POP or IMAP access to its free accounts any longer, so we’ll need to use the offline client from Microsoft as the go-between to transfer the mail. First, download the Windows Live Mail client and install it. Setting up Windows Live Mail to sync with your Hotmail account is fairly straight-forward, or instructions can be found here.

Add your Zimbra account
Next, you’ll want to add the Zimbra account you want to migrate into. At the main page of Windows Live Mail and on the left-hand side of the window you will see a button that says “Add e-mail account” at the bottom of the list of folders.

When you click on that, it will bring up the “Add an E-mail Account” wizard. In the first screen you can fill in the account information and check the box that says “Manually configure server settings for e-mail account.”

After clicking Next, you will fill in the settings for the mail server. The mail server, ports, and other info you will need to find from your email server administrator, but be sure to use the full email address followed by “/tb” for the username. This will cause Zimbra to set the correct timestamp in the mail listing after the import. Click ‘OK’ on the folder selection window.

Drag-and-drop mail
For the mail portion of the migration, you can simply “drag-and-drop” the mail items from the Inbox of your Hotmail account in the list on the left to the Inbox (or appropriate folder) on the freshly created Zimbra account. To do this, you can select the top message, scroll to the bottom, hold down shift and click the last message to select all and drag them in to the new Inbox. The transfer may take some time depending upon how much email is in your account and the speed of the connection to both of the servers.

Export contact to .csv
To export the contacts out of Hotmail, you can click on the “Contacts” button on the bottom-left of the Windows Live Mail window, click the menu button in the contacts window, select “Export” and click on “Comma Separated Values (.CSV)”.

In the CSV Export wizard window, click on browse to select a location and filename to export the contacts to and click Next.Be sure to select all the fields (a lot of the fields are not exported by default) and click “Finish”.  It will then dump a csv file of your contacts to the location you specified.

Import .csv into Zimbra
Log into your Zimbra account on the web interface. Navigate to the Preferences section and go to the Import/Export tab. In the import section of the page, select “Contacts” as the type and select “Outlook contacts” in the drop-down menu.

You can then click on “Browse” and navigate to the file you created earlier and select it. Next, click on import. It will ask you which contact list to import into. Select the contact list you would like and click on “OK”. If everything goes well, you will see a green box appear saying that the import succeeded.

If you navigate over to the Address Book section of Zimbra you’ll see your newly imported contact list.

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (1) : Feb 2nd, 2009

Google Enters the Offline Client Game

Google has finally entered the ranks of its email competitors Yahoo! and Microsoft in offering an offline version of its interface. Yahoo! and Microsoft have both offered offline clients for their mail, calendar, and contact information with Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop and Windows Live Mail for some time now and Google has joined in with Offline Gmail. The product is still in Google Labs so it is still experimental, but it is in essense a broser plugin that allows the broser to cache a user’s mailbox and later will allow the user to cache the calendar and update while offline.

What makes this different from a local mail client such as Outlook or Thunderbird? Well, two things really. The first is a consistent interface. Windows Live Mail (the local client) looks just like Hotmail in the browser. The same goes for Zimbra Desktop and so on. A local mail client is not going to have a consistent interface which can be a pain should users be forced into using the client offline. The second benefit is the lack of a need for a third-party plugin. Mail certainly doesn’t need to have a plugin since it will go over POP or IMAP, but not the other data in your account. Even Microsoft Outlook cannot interface directly with Hotmail for contacts and calendars. If one wanted to sync their contacts from Gmail to say Thunderbird, they would have to install a third-party plugin to do so. The offline clients allow users to have the “syncing” ability without needing to worry about compatibility with the services.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Jan 29th, 2009

Zimbra Hits 20 Million Paid Mailboxes

Zimbra is reporting that its paid mailbox count is now up to 20 million mailboxes. This is up from June of last year when Zimbra reported 11 million paid mailboxes. The open source Exchange competitor is really gaining some momentum and is surpassing Exchange in feature sets. Zimbra Collaboration Suite version 6.0 is due out later this year which includes full BES support, a stable release of its offline client, and allowing server-to-server sync for better HA and DR. Zimbra was acquired by Yahoo! in September of 2007 and could very well help out Yahoo! in its financial recovery if it keeps growing at this pace. The 20 million mailbox count only includes the pay-for version of Zimbra which offers mobility syncing as well as other features and does not include users of its free open source edition which a lot of companies use as well.

Congrats Zimbra!

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Filed under News : Comments (1) : Jan 20th, 2009

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