Install Zimbra Collaboration Suite 7 on Centos 5.5 – Part 1

Simply taken from its website, Zimbra Collaboration Server is the most capable open source email and collaboration suite available today. Zimbra provides organizations major productivity boosts with global address lists, shared calendars and document management on the web or offline with Zimbra Desktop. Support for standard protocols enables use of virtually any desktop client or device for added end user flexibility.

This tutorial shows you how to install Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) 7.0.0 GA Release on Centos 5.5.

The guide starts with the installation of Centos 5.5’s packages required by ZCS 7.0, the installation of ZCS 7.0 on Centos 5.5 and then later configures everything to make it work as a powerful email and collaboration suite application.

I assumed that you already know how to install Centos 5.5. Firstly run ‘yum update’ to make sure the system is up to date. Then you need to disable the firewall and SELinux feature. Later you can easily enable it if you want.

Run ‘system-config-securitylevel’ to disable security level and SELinux. Also disable ‘sendmail’ so it will not conflict with postfix. Also disable the iptables and ip6tabels as well.

/etc/init.d/sendmail stop
chkconfig sendmail off
chkconfig iptables off
chkconfig ip6tables off

Let’s start with the installation of Centos 5.5 packages required by ZCS 7.0.

The following are required packages need to be installed before installing ZCS:
– NPTL (Native POSIX Thread Library – installed by default)
– sudo
– libidn
– gmp, and
– libstdc++

The suggested prerequisite packages: Perl, sysstat, and sqlite. Remember that some packages may be already installed.

Run yum install to install those packages above:

yum install sudo sysstat gmp libidn libstdc++  sqlite

Configure hostname of the server and DNS for the domain

Make sure that in /etc/hosts, the hostname of the server has been pointed to the IP address of the server. It should look like below:

# Do not remove the following line, or various programs
# that require network functionality will fail.
127.0.0.1       localhost.localdomain localhost
192.168.137.2   mail.mydomain.com       mail
::1             localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6

Beside as a mail/Zimbra server, we also will use the server as a DNS server.
For example, we will use a simple domain name ‘mydomain.com’ with the MX record point to mail.mydomain.com.

Create a file /var/named/chroot/var/named/mydomain.com with the following configuration:

;
;       Addresses and other host information.
;
@       IN      SOA     mydomain.com. hostmaster.mydomain.com. (
                               2011030801      ; Serial
                               43200      ; Refresh
                               3600       ; Retry
                               3600000    ; Expire
                               2592000 )  ; Minimum

;       Define the nameservers and the mail servers

               IN      NS      ns.mydomain.com.
               IN      A       192.168.137.2
               IN      MX      10 mail.mydomain.com.

mail            IN      A       192.168.137.2
ns              IN      A       192.168.137.2

Edit the /var/named/chroot/etc/named.conf file to match the mydomain.com

options {
       directory "/var/named";
       dump-file "/var/named/data/cache_dump.db";
       statistics-file "/var/named/data/named_stats.txt";
forwarders { 8.8.8.8; };
};
include "/etc/rndc.key";
// We are the master server for mydomain.com

zone "mydomain.com" {
    type master;
    file "mydomain.com";
};

Start named on the server

/etc/init.d/named start

Enable autostart for named

chkconfig named on

Verify that the dns is working:

host -t mx mydomain.com
mydomain.com mail is handled by 10 mail.mydomain.com.

nslookup mail.mydomain.com
Server:         192.168.137.2
Address:        192.168.137.2#53

Name:   mail.mydomain.com
Address: 192.168.137.2

Until this step we have installed the Centos 5.5 packages required for Zimbra Collaboration Suite 7.0.0 GA Release and configured the domain in the DNS server.

The next step, in the second part of this tutorial, we will go forward to install the Zimbra 7 on Centos 5.5.