1

Topic: Issues with installing on stock RHEL 6.7

======== Required information ====
- iRedMail version (check /etc/iredmail-release): 0.9.4
- Linux/BSD distribution name and version: RHEL 6.7
- Store mail accounts in which backend (LDAP/MySQL/PGSQL): PGSQL
- Web server (Apache or Nginx): Apache
- Manage mail accounts with iRedAdmin-Pro? No
- Related log if you're reporting an issue:
====

Hi, I just finished setting up a new mail server with version 0.9.4 on a RHEL 6.7 and thought I would share a few issues I had: the main one is that the installation script does not properly create the DB schemas when using the postgresql server that comes with the distro: postgresql 8.4.20 does not understands the CREATE TABLE ... IF NOT EXIST statements used in the sql scripts (and neither does 9.0 - you need at least postgresql 9.1). I think the documentation should make it clear what the prerequisites are for a successfull installation.

The second issue is that I would really like to be able to setup iRedMail with a remote Postgresql server. I know the installation makes no provisions for this... I was able to do it by manually recreating the DBs and the users and modifying the configuration files for all the components of the system after the initial setup. Lenghty and with a lot of trial and error, but doable.

Thirdly, the standard PHP shipped with RHEL 6.7 is 5.3.3, which is not enough for current RoundCubeMail versions: you need at least 5.3.7, so I had to add the RHSCL repository to have at least PHP 5.4. Again, it would be nice to have a paragraph in the docs online (and maybe also in the README in the tarball) that specifies this.

Best Regards,
Alberto

----

Spider Email Archiver: On-Premises, lightweight email archiving software developed by iRedMail team. Supports Amazon S3 compatible storage and custom branding.

2

Re: Issues with installing on stock RHEL 6.7

2) Still no plan to support remote PGSQL. Sorry sad
3) Maybe you should try RHEL/CentOS 7. iRedMail uses official packages offered by distro vendors, not third-party package vendors -- but you're free to use them after iRedMail installation, of course.

3

Re: Issues with installing on stock RHEL 6.7

ZhangHuangbin wrote:

2) Still no plan to support remote PGSQL. Sorry sad
3) Maybe you should try RHEL/CentOS 7. iRedMail uses official packages offered by distro vendors, not third-party package vendors -- but you're free to use them after iRedMail installation, of course.

Even so, there should be a clear indication of which OS version should be used. After all, RHEL 6 is still current and will have more point-releases before it's discontinued.

Having a remote database (of any kind) should be a basic capability of any production service; to have the DB on the same host as the application is really asking for trouble (soon you get issues with performance and availability of the whole service). To say nothing of the fact you could have more than one mailserver making use of the same database to help with scaling (with an appropriate shared filesystem, of course).

It's a pity that iRedMail doesn't have the same level of support for PostgreSQL as for MySQL. Looking at the code of the installation script it doesn't seem that difficult to fill in the gaps; I would have to really be in the mood to try and see if I'm able to tinker with that, but maybe...

On the matter of third party packages, RHSCL is an official repository for RHEL by RedHat itself, so no unofficial packages there wink .


Best Regards,
Alberto

4

Re: Issues with installing on stock RHEL 6.7

dec0077 wrote:

Even so, there should be a clear indication of which OS version should be used. After all, RHEL 6 is still current and will have more point-releases before it's discontinued.

This is a bug of iRedMail-0.9.4, not a requirement for PGSQL or RHEL/CentOS versions. I'm working on this issue.

dec0077 wrote:

On the matter of third party packages, RHSCL is an official repository for RHEL by RedHat itself, so no unofficial packages there wink .

I will take a look at this repo. Thanks for sharing.

5

Re: Issues with installing on stock RHEL 6.7

Dear dec0077,

PostgreSQL issue has been fixed, and i repacked iRedMail-0.9.4 moment ago, you can give it a try:
http://www.iredmail.org/download.html

6 (edited by dec0077 2016-01-31 04:23:23)

Re: Issues with installing on stock RHEL 6.7

Hi there,


I just completed a test run of the new version of iRedMail. The new script is able to correctly create all the objects in the postgresql DBs even with version 8.4.20.

To add a few finer points:

the stock rhel 6 (minimal install) is not enough on its own, you need at least the openssh-clients and wget packages, then you have to add the EPEL repository and at least the following packages from the "Optional" channel from RedHat:

libc-client-2007e-11.el6.x86_64.rpm
php-imap-5.3.3-40.el6_6.x86_64.rpm
php-intl-5.3.3-40.el6_6.x86_64.rpm
php-mbstring-5.3.3-40.el6_6.x86_64.rpm

After this, the main scripts can do its job. At the moment, however, I have RoundCubemail up and running, but not iRedAdmin (I still have to check the rest of the component services). I found the httpd DocumentRoot parameter set to /var/www/html, which is wrong, but fixing it is not enough; I'll have to do a little more checking to see what the problem is. I'll keep you posted.


Best Regards,
Alberto M.

7

Re: Issues with installing on stock RHEL 6.7

dec0077 wrote:

the stock rhel 6 (minimal install) is not enough on its own, you need at least the openssh-clients and wget packages, then you have to add the EPEL repository

iRedMail will install wget, and enable epel repo.

dec0077 wrote:

at least the following packages from the "Optional" channel from RedHat:

what's the purpose of these packages? iRedMail will install required php packages.

dec0077 wrote:

but not iRedAdmin (I still have to check the rest of the component services).

any error in apache error log file?

dec0077 wrote:

Root parameter set to /var/www/html, which is wrong

this is the default DocumentRoot path, what do you mean "is wrong"?

8

Re: Issues with installing on stock RHEL 6.7

ZhangHuangbin wrote:
dec0077 wrote:

the stock rhel 6 (minimal install) is not enough on its own, you need at least the openssh-clients and wget packages, then you have to add the EPEL repository

iRedMail will install wget, and enable epel repo.

You are right, I must have done something wrong. I started from scratch again and wget was installed by the setup script correctly.

ZhangHuangbin wrote:
dec0077 wrote:

at least the following packages from the "Optional" channel from RedHat:

what's the purpose of these packages? iRedMail will install required php packages.

Yes, but these four (the 3 php modules are specified in the yum command as you can see from the attached log, where near the top it says there are no packages php-mbstring, php-intl and php-imap, while the fourth is a dependency) are neither in the base RHEL repository nor in the EPEL one. They are in the Optional RHEL channel, so I either had to subscribe to the channel with

subscription-manager repos --enable=rhel-6-server-optional-rpms

or to manually download them from RHN and copy them over to install; I chose the latter way for this test install.

ZhangHuangbin wrote:
dec0077 wrote:

but not iRedAdmin (I still have to check the rest of the component services).

any error in apache error log file?

Apparently, starting from scratch and doing things a little more carefully removed any issues here.

ZhangHuangbin wrote:
dec0077 wrote:

Root parameter set to /var/www/html, which is wrong

this is the default DocumentRoot path, what do you mean "is wrong"?

Forget I ever mentioned anything about it, you are right... since it now works, the issue I had must have been caused by something I did wrong in the previous test.


Best Regards,
Alberto M.

Post's attachments

install.log 11.6 kb, file has never been downloaded. 

pkg.install.log 74.65 kb, file has never been downloaded. 

pkg.manualinstall.log 6.64 kb, file has never been downloaded. 

You don't have the permssions to download the attachments of this post.