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Installing and configuration Zimbra Mail Server on CentOS 8 | RHEL 8
Installing and configuration Zimbra Mail Server on CentOS 8 | RHEL 8
when starting any business. This could mean using mail solutions with SaaS offering or deploying a complete mail solution in your own infrastructure. Zimbra is a popular open source mail solution designed for use in small to large enterprises. There is a commercial offering of you want extra features. In this tutorial we will discuss how you can install configure Zimbra Mail Server on CentOS 8 and RHEL 8 Linux Server.
The main components of Zimbra Mail and Collaboration Server are:- Zimbra Core: These are basic libraries, utilities, monitoring tools, and basic configuration files.
- Zimbra LDAP: This has the OpenLDAP LDAP directory server that provides authentication and configs store for users and other zimbra components.
- Zimbra MTA (mail routing server): Has Postfix mail transfer agent (MTA) that receives email via SMTP and routes each message to the appropriate Zimbra mailbox server using Local Mail Transfer Protocol (LMTP). It also includes the anti-virus and anti-spam components.
- Zimbra Store (Zimbra server): The mailbox server includes Data store, Message store and Index store for the mailboxes on the server. When a mail arrives, the Zimbra server schedules a thread to have the message indexed in the index store.
- Zimbra-SNMP: This is an optional component for for monitoring and it runs on every server (Zimbra server, Zimbra LDAP, Zimbra MTA). Swatch is used to watch the syslog output to generate SNMP traps.
- Zimbra Logger: This is an optional component for the mailbox server. It installs tools for syslog aggregation, reporting, and message tracing. This is required for the message trace feature.
This is the Zimbra Mail Server we’ll install in our CentOS 8 | RHEL 8 server. Follow the steps below to install and configure Zimbra Mail Server on CentOS 8 / RHEL 8 Linux system
The minimum system requirements for this installation are:- Disk: /opt >10GB – Recommended to have /opt/zimbra as a separate partition.
- Mail Domain: FQDN with configured DNS entry for MX, e.g mail.sunilthakur.com
- DNS A record for MX entry
This is what I have on my Server:
Step 1: Update System, install dependencies and configure NTP
As we always do ensure the system is updated to the latest available OS release.
$ sudo free
$ sudo dnf -y update
udo dnf -y install epel-release dnf-utils
sudo dnf config-manager --enable PowerTools
sudo dnf -y install bash-completion vim curl wget unzip openssh-clients telnet net-tools sysstat perl-core libaio nmap-ncat libstdc++.so.6 bind-utils tar
Set server hostname to match Mail Server DNS name:
sudo hostnamectl set-hostname mail.sunilthakur.com
--static
Also configure correct timezone and NTP.
sudo dnf -y install chrony
sudo timedatectl set-timezone Africa/Nairobi
sudo systemctl enable --now chronyd
sudo chronyc sources
Confirm time is correctly set.
$ timedatectl
Local time: Sun 2020-07-05 14:47:26 EAT
Universal time: Sun 2020-07-05 11:47:26 UTC
RTC time: Sun 2020-07-05 11:47:25
Time zone: Africa/Nairobi (EAT, +0300)
System clock synchronized: yes
NTP service: active
RTC in local TZ: no
Perform a system reboot to ensure the server can reboot after the upgrades.
sudo systemctl reboot
Step 2: Configure DNS entries.
We’ll need to set two DNS records.- An A record for the Mail Server
- An MX record
These are the values I’ll be setting for my Zimbra Server
mail.sunilthakur.com A 192.168.117.137
mail.sunilthakur.com MX mail.sunilthakur.com
mail.sunilthakur.com MX mail.sunilthakur.com
My DNS provider is Cloudflare. Please consult your DNS provider on how to configure A and MX records.
Setting A record:
Step 3: Download Zimbra Collaboration Software
There are two editions of Zimbra Collaboration suite:In this guide we’ll install the open source edition of Zimbra on CentOS 8 | RHEL 8 Linux server.
wget https://files.zimbra.com/downloads/8.8.15_GA/zcs-8.8.15_GA_3953.RHEL8_64.20200629025823.tgz
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