Zimlets for managing posix & samba attributes...

Well, this isn't actually new news, but nevertheless I managed to avoid it for some time now. Namely, Zimbra, with upgrade to 7.2, removed plugins that are used to manage Samba and Posix accounts in its LDAP directory. Now, whenever someone asked what about this Zimlets, the answer was "This was never supported by Zimbra and thus someone from community has to step in." If you Google a bit, you'll easily find it, e.g. here or here. Now, this probably is a perfectly reasonable answer from the Zimbra's standpoint, but I believe that Zimbra should know that this plugin was more frequently used one (let me guess it: because it's useful?) and they have to listen their users.

But whatever is/was with those plugins, I had to have them because one of my setups is such that it contains all account databases in Zimbra. When I disabled Samba and Posix Zimlets, everything worked as usual, apart that I was unable to add new users via Web interface. After I managed to get with it for some time now, the time has come that I had to add another user account and I had to see what I'm going to do with non-working Web interface.

After some googling I discovered that someone managed to fix those two plugins, and also at the time this post was written, there are no news if those plugins work with version 8. So, in short, don't upgrade yet if you are using those plugins. To see what was changed in the plugins to make them work, take a look at this post. In any case, go to the Zimbra's gallery and download Posix and Samba Zimlets. The versions I used are 28.5.12 - v6.1 for both Zimlets. Now, before installing open the archives and in each one you'll find config_template.xml files. Open those files in text editor and fill in the correct values. The most important one is LDAP suffix which is by default set to dc=domain,dc=tld and which you should change to reflect your domain. For example, if your domain is example.com then the suffix will be dc=example,dc=com. After you've made changes, save files and put them back in the archive. If you don't do that you'll receive error reports when logging in admin console, and also there will be no existing samba and possix groups. Not to mention that you'll be unable to create new accounts.

Ok, the last step is to undeploy the old versions - in the case you didn't already, and deploy new ones. After deploying, you should log out and then back in and you should see their options under the Configuration section (in the left pane). If you click on, e.g. Manage Samba Groups, you'll see your existing Samba groups. Similarly has to be with the option Posix Groups. If there are no groups (and you know there should be) than you probably messed with LDAP suffixes I was talking about.

And that's it. For the end, if someone from Zimbra is reading this post, then I have a message for you. Namely, don't answer to so many people that you don't support something because it was always unsupported. I don't think it's relevant. If people are using it, and they find it useful, then you should support it. Or at least devote one engineer day to fix the problem. It isn't so expensive and people will have much better opinion about Zimbra.