Thread: Messaging & CoDaboration Appliance

This appliance bundles a messaging and collaboration server called Zim¬bra. We have already covered Zim¬bra extensively in the past issues of PCQuest. Refer to the articles 'Web Mail with Zimbra' (htt/ content! enterprise/2005/105121804. asp) and 'Messaging & Calendaring' (http:// content!linux/ 2007/107031011.asp).

For this article, we assume that you will be using this appli¬ance as your primary mail server, for which you must ensure that the DNS (Do¬main Name Service) Aand MXrecords are set up properly and pointing to the IP ad¬dress assigned to this appliance. Start the appliance as explained in the article 'Instal¬lation & Implementation.' Login as root. By default the Zimbra server is set up for a hostname called mail.pcquest.net and for the domain pcquest.net. You would obvi¬ously like to change this to suite to your or¬ganization. This can be done as follows.

Configuring the appliance
First, we will change the hostname of the appliance and the Zimbra server. Let us as¬sume that you want to set up the hostname, of the appliance and the server, as . Open the file named hosts, found in the directory / etc, in a text editor and add mail.company.com to the first line so that it looks as follows: found in /etc/sysconfig and substitute mail.pcquest.net with mail.company.com for 'HOSTNAME.' Reboot the appliance. Once the appliance boots up, login to the Zimbra's Administration Console by typ¬ing in 7071. Substitute <ip-address> with the IP address of the appliance. Login with 'admin' as the username and 'pass@word' as the pass¬word.

Click on Domains (on the left pane) and on New (right pane). Type company.com for the 'Domain name' and click on finish. Next, click on 'Global Set¬tings.' Under the General tab, select com¬pany.com for 'Default domain.' Click on Save, then on Accounts. Here you see some email accounts with pcquest.net as domain. You will need to change each of these. Click on each, select 'Edit' from the top. For the 'Account name,' select com¬pany.com from the dropdown. Repeat this step for the other accounts. Finally, you can choose to delete pcquest.net domain by clicking on Domains> pc quest> Delete.

Get, set, and go To create email accounts for users, click on Accounts and then on New (right pane). Enter 'shekhar' (say) for the Account name. Type the first and last name of the user. Type in the password (say, se¬cret123) and confirm. Click on Finish. Henceforth, users will be able to login to the Zimbra's Web mail by http://<ip-ad¬dress>. Users will be able to login using their account name and password. The Web mail interface is intuitive enough for users to be able to compose, send, and receive mails. Besides basic mailing, calendaring features of Zimbra have been explained in the article 'Messaging & Calendaring.'



Authenticate with the Directory Server
This is quite easy-follow a Web-based wizard and you are done. We assume that you have set up and are running the Directory Server appliance as explained in the article <directory-server-appliance-article> on page <page-no>. Login to the administration console. Click on Domains>company.com (on the left pane). Click on 'Configure Authentication' (on the top right). For 'Au¬thentication Mechanism,' select 'External LDAP' from the dropdown. Click on Next. For 'LDAP URL,' type the IP address of the Directory Server appliance. For 'LDAP filter,' type in uid=%u. For 'LDAP search base,' type in dc=pcquest,dc=net. Click on Next. Leave the 'Use DN/Password to bind to external server' unchecked. Click on Next. To test the settings, type a user ID and password from the LDAP directory.

For example, as per the article on the directory server ap¬pliance, shekhar as the username and pass word as the password, should work. Click on test. On success¬ful authentication, click on finish. Now users will be able to login to the Web mail, using the user ID and cor¬responding password, in the Directory Server. Note that login to the Zimbra's administration console is not authenticated against the directory server. The direc¬tory server authentication applies only for the Web mail! em ail users.