[Users] May 11, 2021 Zeta Alliance Conference Call Summary

[Randy Leiker]

Hello Zeta Alliance Community, 

Here is a summary of this week’s conference call. A few brief reminders: 


    * Conference calls are every Tuesday and open to all using either the FreeConferenceCall.com VoIP app or via a dial-in number: [ https://www.freeconferencecall.com/wall/zetalliance | https://www.freeconferencecall.com/wall/zetalliance ] 
    * Each week’s call agenda can be found at: [ https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xDyBJFjnfZYxuXJHiDzsXjjMuGGtIl7J | https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xDyBJFjnfZYxuXJHiDzsXjjMuGGtIl7J ] 
    * A copy of each week’s summary is also posted to the Zimbra Forums: 
        * All Prior Months: [ https://forums.zimbra.org/viewforum.php?f=9 | https://forums.zimbra.org/viewforum.php?f=9 ] 
        * April 2021 : [ https://forums.zimbra.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=69507 | https://forums.zimbra.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=69507 ] 
        * May 2021 : [ https://forums.zimbra.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=69570 | https://forums.zimbra.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=69570 ] 
    * Constructive feedback on these call summaries is always welcome. 

May 11 , 2021 

Using doMailboxMove To Pre-Stage Mailbox Blobs 
David M. said that he is currently working on moving mailboxes between two Zimbra mailbox servers that are in geographically dispersed data centers. While testing with the “zxsuite hsm doMailboxMove” command ( [ https://docs.zextras.com/zextras-suite-documentation/latest/powerstore.html#_moving_mailboxes_between_mailstores | https://docs.zextras.com/zextras-suite-documentation/latest/powerstore.html#_moving_mailboxes_between_mailstores ] ) he noticed the “stages” parameter that can be used with the doMailboxMove command for moving only select portions of a mailbox, such as the blobs, backups, data (blobs + backups), or account (metadata). He asked if anyone on the call had experience using the “stages” parameter to pre-stage a mailbox’s blobs on the target mailbox server, from the source server, for the purpose of making the mailbox move occur very quickly from the mailbox owner’s perspective, particularly since the two mailbox servers are in geographically distant data centers? Cine said that using either the “stages blobs” or “stages data” parameters should accomplish what David is seeking to achieve. David asked if he uses the command “zxsuite hsm doMailboxMove stages blobs”, will this place the mailbox in Maintenance Mode, or will it continue to be available in Active Mode? Mark S. said that when you want to have greater control over the time frame of when a mailbox move happens, the “stages blobs” parameter will do an initial move by pre-staging the blobs on the target server, then catch the blobs up-to-date when the “stages account” parameter is used to move the mailbox metadata to the target server. He explained that Maintenance Mode is not triggered until the mailbox metadata is moved to the new mailbox server. He added that new email received for the mailbox while the metadata is being moved will begin queueing at the Zimbra MTA until the mailbox exits Maintenance Mode. 

Matthew F. suggested that David may want to consider skipping moving backups, by omitting it from the “stages” parameter for greater mailbox moving speed. Noah P. asked if it is difficult to perform backup restores from the source server, if the backups are still only on the source server, post-mailbox move. Cine confirmed that you must move the backups to the target server, as part of the mailbox move, in order to perform a mailbox restore. Noah P. said he thinks the decision of whether or not to move backups for a mailbox will mainly depend on if your organization’s policy requires being able to restore earlier backups, prior to the mailbox move. Mark S. said that if David opts not to move the backups with the mailboxes, then the mailbox move command should provide an additional command in its console output that David can optionally use to manually purge the mailbox backup data from the source server. Cine added that if David does not manually purge the backups that are not moved, to free up space on the source server quickly, then he thinks the backups are purged automatically from the source server after about 7 days. He also said that if David wishes to move the mailbox back again from the target to the source server, then the doMailboxMove process is intelligent enough to move only the new items since the first mailbox move. 

Customer Adoption Update For Zimbra Cloud 
Noah P. asked how customer adoption is going with Zimbra Cloud? John E. said that there were customers previously hosted by Synacor, that have been moved over to Zimbra Cloud, but he could not comment further as no one from XMission was available on the call to share an update. 

NG Backup Inconsistencies 
Randy L. said he recently received an email notification from one of his Zimbra mailbox server’s daily SmartScans indicating an inconsistency had been found in the backups. The notification recommended running the command “zxsuite backup doSmartScan start deep true”. He said that he instead started investigating the issue by running the command “zxsuite backup doCoherencyCheck /path/to/backups fixBackup true” for the purpose of performing an in-depth integrity check of the backups. The doCoherencyCheck log contained a few mailboxes with consistency issues that were marked as fixed with log entries like: “user at example.com WARN Removing state 0 in <mailbox-id>/13463”. The log entries for the affected mailboxes were similar except that the “state 0” portion varied, for example “state 5”, or “state 14”. He asked if anyone on the call knew what type of backup integrity issue this referred to, as he could not find any documentation on the Zimbra or Zextras site explaining these log entries. Mark S. said that he has occasionally seen similar notifications from his NG Backups indicating an inconsistency was found, but upon investigation, has found them to be false positives. Cine said that “state 0” is the initial backup for a mailbox, and every subsequent state number is an incremental backup of the mailbox. Cine suggested that running a combination of a “zxsuite backup doSmartScan start deep true” command and a “zxsuite backup doCoherencyCheck /path/to/backups fixBackup true“ command should be enough to ensure a good backup of any affected mailboxes. He explained that each SmartScan backup performed keeps a counter of when the last backup took place. A normal SmartScan (without the deep parameter) will only look at new or changed mailbox items from the counter’s current position. However a SmartScan with the deep parameter will look at every mailbox item for a mailbox, effectively ignoring the counter for a mailbox. 


Randy Leiker ( randy at skywaynetworks.com ) 
Skyway Networks, LLC 
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