[Users] November 10, 2020 Zeta Alliance Conference Call Summary

Sat Nov 14 23:48:16 CET 2020

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://docs.google.com/document/d/1uUUDJpwp2CAylU6lxtbEdVcUX_qSbciyes6gLTWw2fY/edit | https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uUUDJpwp2CAylU6lxtbEdVcUX_qSbciyes6gLTWw2fY/edit ] 
    * 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 ] 
        * October 2020 : [ https://forums.zimbra.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=68823 | https://forums.zimbra.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=68823 ] 
        * November 2020 : [ https://forums.zimbra.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=68942 | https://forums.zimbra.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=68942 ] 
    * Constructive feedback on these call summaries is always welcome. 

November 10, 2020 

Upcoming Zimbra Patches 
Mark S. asked if there were any updates from Zimbra available for 8.8.15 Patch 16 and 9.0 Patch 9. He noticed the Zimbra Partner Portal had not been updated yet with a preview of the release notes for those upcoming patches. Gayle B. said she will work on getting that updated shortly and that the Partner Portal is usually updated about 1 week before each patch release. She is going to see if this information can be posted to the Partner Portal sooner. Mark S. asked if the new Zextras 3.1.4 release discussed in the November 3rd Zeta Alliance call ( [ https://forums.zimbra.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=68942#p299660 | https://forums.zimbra.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=68942#p299660 ] ) will be incorporated into these upcoming patches. John E. said that 6.0.17 of NG modules will be included within 8.8.15 P16 and 9.0 P9, and Cine confirmed this is equivalent to the Zextras 3.1.4 release. Cine said there have been some stability improvements included too which will benefit AWS S3 connection handling that keeps HTTPS connections to a minimum, as some providers (Digital Ocean) have very low connection time outs that were causing issues for Zimbra administrators. 

New ZURT Release 
Mark S. said he noticed that there is a ZURT (Zimbra Usage Reporting Tool; used by Zimbra Service Providers for license usage reporting) version in the Zimbra repos. He asked if the new ZURT has any dependencies on the latest or upcoming patches, or if the ZURT can be installed independently. John H. said that ZURT can be installed independently and will restart the ZURT service automatically after it has been updated. He explained that the new ZURT has better support for older OSes like Red Hat 12 and also fixes a bug within the mailbox usage reporting, where there can be a difference between the license usage data in the CVS file generated by ZURT and the usage information reported automatically to Zimbra. Mark S. asked if Zimbra Connect usage is being reported automatically by ZURT yet. John H. said Connect usage still needs to be reported manually. 

Controlling SMTP Mail Flow In Zimbra 
Noah P. said he is experimenting with directing certain customer domains in Zimbra to specific Zimbra MTA servers. For example, customers that send mostly personal email can be directed to one or more MTAs, while other customers that send bulk or questionable mail can be sent to another MTA where throttling or more restrictive outbound SMTP policies can be applied. He said he has been using the “zimbraSmtpHostname” setting at the domain level in Zimbra to see if he can control which MTA is used for each customer domain. While this seems to work fine for all outgoing email sent from a given customer’s domain, it however does not seem to have any impact on outbound email sent from Zimbra distribution lists. Matthew F. said that he is also managing which customer domains may use which Zimbra MTA, and that he has found success by using SMTP relays, external to Zimbra, to manage the mail flow, but he too has the same issue of not being able to control which MTAs Zimbra uses internally for outbound distribution list email. John H. explained that when a message is delivered to a distribution list in Zimbra, the delivery address is first expanded at the MTA level, which will have the effect of ignoring the domain level setting for the MTA (zimbraSmtpHostname). Noah said he also looked at the “zimbraMailTransport” setting too, but did not know if it was supported for use with distribution lists. Noah opened Zimbra support case 01097971 on this issue. 

Follow-Up: Restoring Zimbra Backups From AWS S3 Buckets 
As a follow-up to the November 3rd Zeta Alliance call discussion ( [ https://forums.zimbra.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=68942#p299660 | https://forums.zimbra.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=68942#p299660 ] ) about backing up and restoring from AWS S3 buckets after 8.8.15 Patch 16 and 9.0 Patch 9 are released, Cine said that disaster recovery or data migration can be performed in Zimbra by restoring directly from S3, or by restoring from S3 + a local copy of the backup metadata on a new Zimbra server. 

Cine explained that if Zimbra data is being restored from S3 only, and there is no local copy of the backup metadata, then the backup metadata will need to be downloaded to the new Zimbra server first, along with configuring the S3 bucket in Zimbra, before a restore operation can begin. However, the S3 bucket on the new Zimbra server should not be configured as a backup target, to avoid the risk of inadvertently overwriting data on S3, from the new Zimbra server. This will result in the old backup path being restored on the new Zimbra server, so that an external restore process can be started, along with specifying the backup archive option within the restore command, so that Zimbra knows to restore the mailbox blobs from S3. 

Mark S. asked if it is wise to run more frequent SmartScans to lower the RPO (recovery point objective) for a disaster recovery, by ensuring that S3 receives more frequent data updates from Zimbra. He said his concern is what happens if a Zimbra mailbox server should become corrupted, including the backup metadata. Cine said that running more frequent SmartScans should not be necessary, but does recommend keeping an additional local backup copy of the Zimbra backup metadata if possible, as it will be much faster to begin the disaster recovery restore, than needing to first download the backup metadata from S3 first. To get a shorter RPO, Cine thinks that syncing the metadata to S3 more frequently would help and suggested this could be accomplished using Cron jobs multiple times per day, which will take more server resources, but not as many resources as frequent SmartScan operations. Matthew F. asked if there is any means to convert an existing Zimbra mail store’s backups to use the new S3 backup target capabilities in the upcoming 8.8.15 Patch 16 and 9.0 Patch 9. Cine said there is a command line option to do this, but it will require additional server resources and affect performance temporarily on the Zimbra mailbox servers while the conversation takes place over a period of time. 

New Location For Zeta Alliance Call Summaries 
Cine said that he is setting up a new Google Drive container for all of the Zeta Alliance call agendas at: [ https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xDyBJFjnfZYxuXJHiDzsXjjMuGGtIl7J?usp=sharing | https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xDyBJFjnfZYxuXJHiDzsXjjMuGGtIl7J?usp=sharing ] and anticipated having this completed within about a week. 

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

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