Zimbra Upgrade Wrap-up

The dry details: Zimbra upgrade this weekend is complete. It seems to be faster and the issues we’d seen with dropped IMAP connections and blank e-mail copies seems to be solved, let us know if this is otherwise. There are new features in the new server, which you can explore at your leisure, and iCal sync instructions have been updated.The pointless exposition, in which I show my age something fierce:Come and listen to a story ’bout thing called mail,it went through a big change, but still kinda failed.Until finally, the decision got made:It was once again time to push through a ‘grade.Upgrade, that is.Five-oh-six.And faster disk.Of course, the next thing you know, it didn’t go as planned:took a couple hours more, but things were well in hand,And ’round about 3, things were lookin’ pretty fine10 minutes more and we were finally online.Back on-line!New features!Bug fixes!Yes, folks, the upgrades this past weekend appear, thus far, to be a success. There were some big issues we were hoping to see resolved, and it feels like they have been. Here’s what we’d noticed over the past few weeks:

• Dropped IMAP connections: Users were experiencing drops of their IMAP connections with a certain regularity. Especially overnight. We believe this issue has been fixed based off of preliminary reports. I should note, though, that everyone’s IMAP connection will drop one night per week when a backup is run on their account. When your account is backed up, all connections to it are killed and the account is set to maintenance mode for the duration of the backup. The accounts are divided into seven groups, and one group is backed up in full each night. (Redo logs cover any changes between backups, so we can restore with a much finer granularity than just one backup per week).
• Slow response: Web and mail clients would see laggy response logging in. This should also be addressed, though I’ll note that Safari 3 and Zimbra 5 interoperability is considered ‘beta’ by Zimbra at this stage. They are still working on several known issues.
• Blank e-mail copies: Some users (myself included) were finding large messages with attachments would result in blank copies appearing when those messages were copied via a server-side filter. This bug should be no more.
• Redlivery of already-delivered mail: Likewise, if a user was forwarding their mail, and the message was large, the user would see repeated attempts to deliver the mail as long as the forward rule kept failing on large messages. This appears to be fixed.

On top of that, we’ve got us some new features, specifically:

• Scheduled Out of Office Autoreplies: When you set your Out of Office message, you’ll note that you now have the option to specify a start and stop date for the messages.
• Flexible alarm schedules: Zimbra is now supporting flexible alarm schedules on a per-appointment basis via the web client. (Why it took them this long, I’ll never know.)

Also, for you iCal users out there running Leopard, you can find instructions on how to sync your calendars without using the iCal sync connector at http://www.mcs.anl.gov/faq/Mail#Zimbra_and_iCal. It’s been reliable and solid for me, though it’s not as cut and dry to set up. Also, it’s a little inconvenient for iPhone users who regularly add appointments via their phone, though I’m hoping that clears up once ActiveSync lands in July.Last tidbit, the Web version of this blog is now iPhone friendly.That’s about it for the post-mortem on the upgrade. And thus…Now it’s time to say ‘bye in this Dispatch from the geeks,I’m sure there’ll be another one within a couple weeks.You’re encouraged to take a peek at our friendly, helpful logat MCS dot ANL dot gov slash systemsblogWeb 2.0!Subscribe to RSS!Sit & read a spell!Y’all come back now, y’hear?And yes, I just made a valid mcs.anl.gov/systemsblog redirector so it would fit with the meter of the lyrics. Sue me. 🙂