[Mail Server]: Complete guide to install Zimbra Mail on CentOS & RHEL

Complete guide to install Zimbra Mail on CentOS & RHEL

Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) or commonly known as Zimbra Mail, is collaborative software suite that includes an email server and a web client. It also includes contacts, file sharing, calendar , tasks etc which can be easily accessed via web mail.

Zimbra offers two editions, the commercially supported edition called ‘Network Edition’ & an free/open source version called ‘Open Source Edition’, which is the focus of this tutorial. In this tutorial, we are going to discuss how to install Zimbra mail on CentOS & RHEL machines.

Let’s start by discussing some requirements for Zimbra mail on CentOS,

Pre-requisites

1- We need to have a systems with freshly installed OS, minimal OS is recommended. We can also use a system with pre-installed OS but make sure that we have web, database & mail services (Postfix, Sendmail) disabled.

Even with freshly installed OS, we will have some of these services working, mainly POSTFIX. Disable it,

$ sudo systemctl stop postfix

$ sudo systemclt disable postfix

2- We will also need ‘A record’ & ‘MX record ‘ for our mail server in DNS, this is required to send & receive mails. We can also use a local DNS server for the same.

If not have one already, refer to our article on “How to create a BIND Server” to create a local DNS server.

3- Create a hostname entry for your server in ‘/etc/hosts’ file,

$ sudo vim /etc/hosts

192.168.1.120 testmail.linuxtechlab.com testmail

where, ‘testmail.linuxtechlab.com’ is FQDN of the server & ‘testmail’ is the name of the server.

Installation

Before we can install Zimbra mail on Centos or RHEL system, we need to install dependency packages for ZCS. Install them using the following command,

$ sudo yum install wget perl perl-core ntpl nmap sudo libidn gmp libaio libstdc++ unzip sysstat sqlite

After these packages have been installed, we are now ready to download & install latest version of Zimbra mail on CentOS and RHEL systems. At the time of writing this tutorial, 8.7.11 is the latest version available. Download it using the following command,

$ wget https://files.zimbra.com/downloads/8.7.11_GA/zcs-8.7.11_GA_1854.RHEL7_64.20170531151956.tgz

For CentOS & RHEL 6, use the following command to download the install script,

$ wget https://files.zimbra.com/downloads/8.7.11_GA/zcs-8.7.11_GA_1854.RHEL6_64.20170531151956.tgz

Downloaded file is a tar package, extract it

$ tar -xzf zcs-8.7.11_GA_1854.RHEL7_64.20170531151956.tgz

Next, enter into the extracted folder,

$ cd zcs-8.7.11_GA_1854.RHEL7_64.20170531151956

Now, we will start the installation script for the Zimbra mail,

$ ./install.sh –platform-override

Note:- ‘–platform-override’ option is used because script is meant to run on Redhat but to install Zimbra mail on CentOS, we need to add that option.

Once the script starts, we would be firstly required to accept the license. Accept the license by pressing ‘Y’ key,

& than will be asked if you would like to use ‘Zimbra Package repository’, press Y. Next, select the packages you need to install. We are selecting all packages for installation,

Installation will than start, it will take some time to complete,

Once the installation completes, you will get the following screen as output,

Here we can change any configuration for our server, if we find them wrong or just want to modify them.

We will be changing password for admin user, change it by pressing ‘3’ key & provide the password. Once changes have been made, apply all the configurations made by pressing ‘a’ key & Zimbra will than apply the configurations to the server.

Next save the configuration file by pressing ‘s’ key & quit from the menu by pressing ‘q’ key. Our Zimbra server on CentOS system is now ready, start the Zimbra service,

$ su – zimbra

$ zmcontrol start

& login to the Zimbra mail from a browser with the URL,

http://testmail.linuxtechlab.com

Enter the username ‘admin’ & password that we provided during installation,

After logging in, we can than perform functions like add new accounts, install certificated etc.

This was our tutorial on how to install Zimbra mail on CentOS & RHEL systems.

How to rename user in Linux (also rename group & home directory)

Rename user in Linux

For renaming user in Linux systems, we will use ‘usermod’ command. Syntax for the command is,

$ usermod -l new_username old_username

For example, if we have a user named ‘dan’ & want to rename it to ‘susan’, execute the following command from terminal;

$ sudo usermod -l susan dan

This will only change the username & everything else, like group, home directory, UID will remain same.

Note:- You should need to logged out from the account you are trying to rename. You can also kill all the processes running for that user, to do so execute the following command,

$ sudo pkill -u dan

$ sudo pkill -9 -u dan

Renaming Home directory

For renaming home directory to correspond to the renamed user, we use ‘-d’ option with ‘usermod’ command.,

$ sudo usermod -d /home/susan -m susan

Changing UID for the user

To change the UID of the user , execute the following command,

$ sudo usermod -u 2000 susan

where ‘2000’ is the new UID for user.

Renaming the group

To rename the group from ‘dan’ to ‘susan‘, we will use ‘groupmod’ command. Use the following command to rename the group,

$ groupmod -n susan dan

Once we have made the required changes, we can than check the changes made using the ‘id’command,

$ id susan