Field report of Kolab installation on Gentoo (hardened)

[Strunzdesign]

Hi,

one week ago, I decided to play around with the Kolab overlay for Gentoo. I wanted to clarify if a kolab as a groupware solution allows me to share my contacs and my calendars while being at work or at home. For this purpose, I have a PC running at home that is online 24/7 via DSL and runs hardened gentoo. Okay, I decided to try it out :-)

At first, I ended with a working Kolab installation :-) It is a very great piece of software that does exactly what I was looking for. Many thanks for your efforts to create the ebuilds! Great work :-)

Okay, what happened... at first, I had some problems with layman that refused to check out the Kolab repository. The reason: "subversion" was not installed! I think this is another bug regarding the layman ebuild that does not depend on subversion yet. After installing it manually, I was able to check everything out.

Next problem: A version of php was required that was neither in the portrage tree nor in the overlay. I ended up testing the php-experimantal overlay, which worked well. In the meantime, I found this forum and found this advice too :-) Now, it was included to the kolabd overlay and php-experimental is no longer required :-)

After installing php, some kolab-related package (sorry, I forgot the exact name. It had *kolab* in its name, but not kolabd) stopped during use-flag checking. It required php to be installed with the "cli" use-flag enabled. This was not required in the howto, so I added it to package.keywords and emerged php again. Then everything compiled :-)

Okay... then I started kolabd. No errors :-) I started to play around with it, but I'll write this down in the next post... I don't know if this forum implements a length restriction of posts :-)

Regards,
Florian

[Strunzdesign]

Hi again :-)

Okay... the first real problem that arised was after logging in to the kolab webinterface. I created a new user and started to play around with it. After some experiments, my imap folders were out-of-sync and at seemed that information was not handled correctly any more. I started to investigate, and noticed that "kolabd" was stopped!?! Each kolab-related service was still up, but kolabd was down. Hmm... I played around a little bit and ended up with a total re-emerge of the kolab-realted packages in order to debug this:

Was happens: Kolabd is stopping in exactly the moment when an admin assigns the default mail accounts such as "abuse@domain" to an existing account. Right after comittment, kolabd shuts down! You have to restart it manually as root, but normally you have no clue whats going on... a reboot helps because everything is started again, but why does kolad stop? Is this intentional?

Then I have a problem regarding shared calendars and contact resources that were created in the web interface of kolab. They work very well, but I'm unable to remove them cleanly. I can delete these folders here, and regarding the webinterface they are gone. But my user that has already imported these folders within KDE kontact (3.5.9), the folders are still visible. I was unable to delete these folders... instead, I get errors such as "public folder xxx could not be deleted" and so on... I manually had to stop the subscription in the configuration of imap folder, but they are still visible there. I tried a full resync, but it seems that these folders were not erased correctly on the server.

Last thing: From time to time, the system starts to do something (the harddisk rattles *g*). I discovered that a process called "squatter" is doing something here... it seems that squatter does some sort of indexing my imap folders. is this really necessary?

Okay... nice work btw :-)
I'm looking forward to see kolab integrated in the mainline portage tree... it is working nicely here. Thank you again :-)

Regards,
Florian

[Gunnar Wrobel]

Thanks for the report!

That kolabd stops is certainly not intentional This indicates that it hits a bug and shuts down. kolabd reports to syslog and you can try to increase the log leven in /etc/kolab/kolab.globals to get more information.

The squatter on the hand is intentional and should help to speed up imap search operations. For small systems/mailboxes you can probably turn it of.

I'm actually suprised to see that the ebuilds still work that nicely for people trying Kolab. The 2.1 Version was an early draft and still has plenty of problems. But it also showed me what needs to be improved for the next versions. Working on that

Cheers,

Gunnar