This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Kliwon Klimis on 28th October 2008 425 cilce, , frood, grradt, 525254

Administrating Zimbra

Administering Zimbra from the Command Line

Although the Administration Console could handle the bulk of the administration needs an email administrator may need to handle, there are a few tasks that need to be handled using the Command Line Interface. In this section, we will be looking at two specific command line tools and will continue to focus on additional tools throughout the rest of this book. The first tool we will be focusing on is zmcontrol.

Managing Services with zmcontrol

Zimbra Collaboration Suite uses a tool called zmcontrol to manage and monitor services via a command line. The three options we will look at will be status, start, and stop. The status option will display the list of all services configured for the Zimbra installation and will display the status of each one. To use zmcontrol:

1.Switch to the Zimbra user by logging into the server as root, and then typing su – zimbra at the command prompt, as displayed below.

[root@zimbra ~]#

su – zimbra

2. Now as the Zimbra user, you need to enter zmcontrol status

[zimbra@zimbra ~]$ zmcontrol status

3.A listing of the services will be returned to the command window, along with each service's status.

Host zimbra.emailcs.com
antispam	Running
antivirus	Running
ldap	Running
logger	Running
mailbox	Running
mta	Running
snmp	Running
spell	Running

4.It appears all of our services are up and running. However, if we wanted to stop the services, we could use zmcontrol with the stop option.

[zimbra@zimbra ~]$ zmcontrol stop Host zimbra.emailcs.com

Stopping mta...Done Stopping spell...Done

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This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Kliwon Klimis on 28th October 2008 425 cilce, , frood, grradt, 525254

Chapter 3

Stopping snmp...Done Stopping antivirus...Done Stopping antispam...Done Stopping imapproxy...Done Stopping mailbox...Done Stopping logger...Done Stopping ldap...Done

5. And finally, to start all of our services back up we could use the start option.

[zimbra@zimbra ~]$ zmcontrol start Host zimbra.emailcs.com

Starting ldap...Done. Starting logger...Done. Starting mailbox...Done. Starting antispam...Done. Starting antivirus...Done. Starting snmp...Done. Starting spell...Done. Starting mta...Done.

zmcontrol also has an option for maintenance. This places Zimbra and a read-only mode for all users, and is used during the backup process. We will use this option as we discuss Backup and Recovery in a later chapter.

Creating Accounts with zmprov

As we walked through creating users with the Administration Console, I am sure some of you were thinking there has got to be a better way to create users. Especially since most email administrators will be dealing with hundreds of users. Zimbra uses a command line utility called zmprov that is used to add accounts, administrators, and aliases from the command line. Also, because this is a command line tool, it is not difficult to create a script or batch process to create multiple users with ease.

To create the user account we will use the zmprov utility, as with three options. First, we will use ca meaning "create account". Second, we will enter the email address for the account. Last, we will need to give the user a password.

1. From a command line as the Zimbra user, enter the following:

[zimbra@zimbra ~]$ zmprov ca [e-mail] password

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