This guide will take you through installing Zimbra Collaboration Server (ZCS) which is an integrated bundle of Mail Server, web-documents, and other collaboration services enriched with easy web-administration interfaces. This makes ZCS a good choice for those who do not want to install and configure all the tools and service needed to support the features required for email, and web administration + web-mail interface is quite a time and effort saving feature of ZCS.

This guide makes a few assumptions about the prerequisites that have already been made/configured/handled:

• The server will handle email for the domain test-example.com.
• The server will be hosted on a machine named mail.test-example.com.
• The DNS is properly set up for resolving the names, and as well as for the MX record for test-example.com.
• The machine for mail server has access to the DNS server and can resolve names.
• The installer for ZCS (RHEL 6) has been downloaded.
• The mail server has access to the Internet (for installing/updating packages, as well as to contact external relay MTA)
• sudo is configured for the user, or the commands are used as root user.

Pre-Installation Tweaks

• Disable system installed postfix/sendmail as ZCS runs its own postfix. System-wide installed postfix/sendmail interferes with ZCS’s postfix.

sudo service postfix stop
sudo chkconfig postfix off
sudo service sendmail stop
sudo chkconfig sendmail off

• Install nc package

sudo yum -y install nc

• Disable SELinux (I’ve not yet found a way to use ZCS with SELinux on).

vim /etc/sysconfig/selinux

In the file, set:

SELINUX=disabled

sudo setenforce 0

• Allow a few ports for Zimbra beforehand (not required before installation, but makes no harm in pre-setting it)

sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 443 -j ACCEPT #HTTPS
sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 3930 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 110 -j ACCEPT #POP3
sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 143 -j ACCEPT #IMAP
sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 993 -j ACCEPT #IMAPS
sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 389 -j ACCEPT #LDAP
sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 995 -j ACCEPT #POP3S
sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 7025 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 5800 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 5900 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 7071 -j ACCEPT #Port for ZCS Web Administration
sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 3894 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 3895 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT #HTTP (for webmail) 

• Fix the hosts file.

vim /etc/hosts

Put the name of the machine (i.e. mail.test-example.com) in the hosts file (assuming that the IP of the machine is 10.0.0.253):

10.0.0.253    mail.test-example.com mail

The hosts file should look like this:

127.0.0.1    localhost localhost.localdomain localhost4 localhost4.localdomain4
::1          localhost localhost.localdomain localhost6 localhost6.localdomain6
10.0.0.253   mail.test-example.com mail

Install ZCS

• Deflate the installation archive (in this case zcs-7.1.3_GA_3346.RHEL6_64.20110928134428.tgz file).

tar -zxvf zcs-7.1.3_GA_3346.RHEL6_64.20110928134428.tgz

• Start the installation:

cd zcs-7.1.3_GA_3346.RHEL6_64.20110928134428
./install.sh --platform-override

• You’ll be asked various questions during the installation, use the default or obvious answers.
• Before completing the installation and writing configuration parameters to the configuration file, you’ll be prompted to review the settings or to fix some unset configuration. At this step, make sure you set the password for the admin user. It has a menu based approach. After reviewing/setting configuration, get out of the screen and save the configuration.
• Let the installer do the rest of the configuration, at the end of which you will be notified of the completion of the installation.

Access Zimbra Collaboration Server

The default location of ZCS installation is /opt/zimbra/, and the installer configures a init.d/service script through which you can stop, start, restart and check the status of ZCS. All zimbra components and daemons run as user zimbra. ZCS Administrative web-interface is available at 7071 port and the webmail runs at the default http port (i.e. port 80) of the machine. For this instance, the administrative interface would be available at http://mail.test-example.com:7071 and the webmail would be available at http://mail.test-example.com.