Ajcody-New-Customers-Users

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Please see Information_for_New_Customers for the "certified documentation".

Help For New Support Customers & Users

Actual New Customers & Users Homepage

Please see Ajcody-New-Customers-Users

Details On What's Supported And Response Times

Please review the following:

  • http://www.zimbra.com/support/support_overview.html
  • Log in to your Zimbra support portal account (Network Edition Customers) read the "Support Program Plan" (pdf) linked on the left side. Specifically observe the under "Exclusions" and "Reasonable Use Policy" sections.
    • As of 12 August 2008, it says:
      • Requests that are excluded from support include but are not limited to: performing initial installs of customer systems, performing migrations, performing upgrades of customer systems, performing configuration changes to add or remove servers or services, and testing a customer’s system. Zimbra Professional Services may be available to assist with these projects.

New Network Support Customers

Your sales contact should already have made a support record for your company in our case management tool (Salesforce). Once setup, contacts ["accounts"] can be added to your Salesforce support record. Added contacts are then tied into our other primary support tool, the Support Portal.

Please Contact Sales if you're unsure whether you and/or your company have been setup in Salesforce/Support Portal.

If you are an existing customer, and know your company was already setup in the support tools, and you have an account but need to add individuals to the "Contacts" record, please submit a case to support with the following information:

  • Full Name of new contact
  • Title of new contact
  • Best Phone to reach new contact This will be used in outage situations as well, most likely
  • Email address of new contact

Login url for the Support Portal is linked from here:

Understanding The Support Process For Outages

These are my own thoughts & advise that I want to share with customers so they can avoid a bad experience in case they have an outage situation.

  1. Create a case via the Support Portal
    • Left-hand lower section, Case Menu > Submit A New Case
    • When you need urgent help PLEASE DON'T EMAIL DIRECTLY TO support@zimbra.com. Cases that come in this way will not get flagged appropriately for an outage situation, they will be flagged lower in priority within our queue. Support Portal you may assign the appropriate priority level accordingly to scope, impact, urgency of issue
    • Please include as much detail as possible to allow us to perform effective investigation prior to calling you. Having details of the situation also allows us to reach out to any resources (people) we may feel are needed prior to calling you back.
    • Include contact information in the new case record. Desk phone, cell phone, alternate email address, and YahooIM are all useful. This allows us to contact you for clarification as needed.
  2. Call the Support Phone Line
    • If you get the voice mail - don't panic or hang up without leaving a voice mail.
    • Leaving Voice Mail
      • Give your name and company first
      • Give your Case number that you created second.
      • Summarize the outage situation.
      • Mention your contact information.
  3. Continue to work on the issue yourself.
    • Promptly update the case with all relevant information you discover
      • Left-hand lower section, Case Menu > Case Management
      • If you can't "email", use the Comments section with your case record to input the information.
  4. If you have not received a response from us, please try updating the case and calling into the Support Phone Line again
    • Note that depending on the day and hour of your outage, time might be needed for the information to route to the on-call staff and for them to get into a position to respond.

How To Communicate Support Need Clearly

This is well worth everyone one skimming over once:

Bugzilla And Why It Matters

Bugzilla is a critical tool for our customers, and those that ignore it do so at their own peril (mwah hah hah). Well, that was a little over the top, but you should totally learn to use bugzilla. Here's some basics to get you started.

Create Bugzilla Account

This is open to anyone. It's not tied to your Network Edition support id.

Recommended Saved Searches

Once you've created your account and logged in, let's create a search that will find bugs that have your email in the CC: field.

  1. Go to http://bugzilla.zimbra.com/query.cgi
  2. Decide if you want to adjust the highlighted items under "Status:".
  3. Under "Email Addresses, Bug Numbers, and Votes", have only the "a CC list member" checked. The "contains" field should then include your email address.
  4. Click on "Search" at the bottom.
  5. Scroll down to bottom of search results window, and in the field for "Remember Search as" put in "My CC's". Click on the "Remember search" button.

These saved search configurations will now show up towards the bottom of the bugzilla windows. They can be reconfigured or deleted under your Preferences > Saved Searches.

When you have a support case and the issue is tied back to a bug or RFE, it will be crossed linked within bugzilla and our case management tool. Once you know the bug/RFE number, add yourself to the CC: field for it. In my opinion, the Zimbra support case can be closed at this point because bugzilla will notify you of changes via email now. And if you have the saved CC search above, it will be easy for you to manage those as well.

My Saved Bugs

There is also a default saved search, "My Bugs". This is for the bug/RFE's you created.

Bugs And RFE's In Regards To Your Support Case

When you have a case that's related to a bug or rfe, the support staff should tie the case number to the bug or rfe. This will increase the priority. Here's what you need to do on your part:

  • Login to bugzilla and goto the bug / rfe page in question.
  • Add your email address to the CC field and save.
    • This will notify you of updates by email.
  • Click on the Vote button.
    • This is again a way to increase the priority.

At this point, bugzilla will take over the case issue in question. There is no longer need for the support case to be open.

Use The Advance Search

First, here's a trick I do when a new topical question comes up.

  • I go to bugzilla.zimbra.com .
  • Click on the "search" link [not button] which should give you an advance search.
  • I then shift-click all the items under "Status" and then put in my search terms.
    • I believe the default search function only queries against "unconfirmed, new, assigned, reopened".

Missing the other "status" items has burnt me in the past.

You can also narrow your search by choosing the different "components". This is very useful when your using generic search terms.

Zimbra Product Portal Page - The Birdseye View Of Bugzilla

Zimbra's Product Portal Page is like the executive summary of the bugzilla activity and future release information.

The most useful part of this site is the ability to drill down on a ZCS version until you'll be able to see the various targeted release dates. For example, clicking on the 6.0 (GunsNRoses) listing under Releases will show the subversions of 6.x. This will show a target date for the release, if one has been made public yet. You then can click on a particular version, 6.0.4 for example. This will now show all bugs and rfe's tied to the 6.0.4 release.

Create A Forum Account

Please create a forum account. There's a wealth of information and experienced Zimbra administrators that are accessible there.

Please see:

Create A Wiki Account

Here's the direct url to create an account on the wiki server:

Why is this important?

  • It allows you to participate in improving the wiki articles and content. You need to be logged in to make edits.
    • You can make your own articles if you find something missing that might prove useful to others.
    • You can improve existing articles.
    • You can also add to the "discussion" page for an article. This is a good section to add comments for those less inclined to be bold and modify the main article.
      • You can propose questions and other things here as well.
  • You can add article pages to your "watchlist", so you can monitor your favorite articles for changes.
    • You can also setup in your preferences to be notified by email in regards to changes.
  • You can have your own personal section on the wiki.
    • Just use the category of "community sandbox" at the bottom of them.
      • [[Category: Community Sandbox]]
    • My recommendation if you decide to create articles would be to add your username in front of the topic:
      • Username-Topic , for example - Ajcody-New-Customers
    • And then add this under your own user profile page [for example - http://wiki.zimbra.com/index.php?title=User:Ajcody]
      • {{:Special:PrefixIndex/YourUsername}} , for example - {{:Special:PrefixIndex/Ajcody}}
      • This will then automatically list out all your articles under your username.

Create A YahooIM Account

Most of us in support have YahooIM accounts and this can prove useful even when on a telephone call since it speeds up the sharing of information. It's to the discretion of the support staff to offer the IM session.

Please see:

Remote Server Access

Conditions For Remote Access

In some cases, a Zimbra TSE may request access to the system in question. Direct access is not generally the preferred method of investigation on cases, and we typically request that the customer please perform the hands-on administration of your system, with which you would be far more familiar than Zimbra; in some cases however, direct access may be considered an option for investigating the situation.

Zimbra TSE's will need some way to communicate with someone on your IT staff when they are going to log in to your servers. Zimbra Support helps and facilitates customers with their problems but we are not the "administrators" of customers servers and can't make independent decisions on what to do or not on their servers. We need to have access to immediate forms of communication [phone, IM, etc.] with someone at the company with the authority to make those decisions.

Support SSH Keys

Note that it is not required that customers allow remote server access.

In the Zimbra Support Portal, a public key for ssh is available for situations when Zimbra support will log in to a customer server using ssh. You can allow remote connections for a user (typically zimbra or root) by logging in to the server as that user and following these steps.

1. Save the key file on the server as /opt/zimbra/.ssh/zsupport_dsa.key.pub

2. Add the key to the user's authorized_keys file; command #1 outputs the current list of keys; command #2 appends the support key

1% cat ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
2% cat /opt/zimbra/.ssh/zsupport_dsa.key.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
Note, the ~/ above will be setting up the ssh access for the same username that is running the commands. This is the "user" that you'll tell Zimbra is the login account for ssh to the server.

3. Verify that pubic key access is allowed by sshd

In the sshd config file (typically /etc/ssh/sshd_config), the value of the PubkeyAuthentication keyword should not be no. It's OK if it is not listed or if it is commented out; the default is yes.

4. Confirm, if appropriate, that the user you setup for ssh access will be able to su and/or sudo to gain zimbra and/or root access.

5. You'll then need to communicate to support that the key is setup and provide the necessary information:

  • username to login with
  • password if required for ssh access
  • the initial server [hostname/ipaddr] to ssh to and then how to access other servers inside if needed
  • way to gain zimbra or root access [su - [usernmae] or via sudo]
It is up to you, how you would like to communicate the login information to support - email, IM, phone, etc..

Shared Sessions With the screen Utility

The screen command line utility allows multiple users to attach to the same terminal session. To start a new screen session, run screen -m or screen -R. To attach to an existing screen session, run screen -x. Additional documentation for screen is available online.

Sun Shared Shell Application

Sun Microsystems offers a java application to allow shared access to a terminal session. More information is available at their site.

DimDim

This might interest some customers as well DimDim Web Conferencing . They have an OSS edition - DimDim OSS Edition

Planning My Installation

Expectations

Support doesn't do migration for customers, nor do we do migration planning. We can help if you run into issues during migration. Are there gray areas involved in this? Yes, of course. Some guidelines to follow:

  • Engage your sales contact about your needs.
    • Sales has access to pre-sales engineers and tools that can help plan your Zimbra deployment and migrations.
    • If your needs exceed the above, they can determine if our Professional Services group would be a good option for you.
  • When you start to engage the Support Team
    • Try to have specific questions or issues rather than large open-ended ones - those that imply support is doing the planning or migration for you.
    • It would be helpful if you documented your "plan" to the best of your ability and to share that with support as issues or questions come up.
      • This gives us more "concrete" information to work against.
    • Be prepared to know and investigate the technical requirements for the "other" mail server. Support will offer what we can but there is no obligation for us to know all the in's and out's of another mail server product. The exception to this would be when we are working with our tools that we developed for migration. And even then, there is a certain expectation of knowledge we require of the administrator in regards to the other mail system.
  • Remember, anyone can use the Zimbra Forums! Advise and help is free and open to everyone on the forums.

First

Please take time to review the Administrators Guide. Noting what features you might want or need for the installation. It would be wise to make notes while your skimming the guide of features your wanting. Depending on the choices you have, it might drastically effect your installation steps. Do you want HSM, Archive & Discovery, Proxies - what type, and so forth.

The Basics

Starting Official Source Guides

Other Resources To Review

General Ways To Find More Specific Information:

Please Consider Your Backup Issues Before Deploying

Assuming you've consulted the other above resources as well.

More items to consider:

Be Aware Of DR Processes

Multi-Server Installations

Assuming you read or skimmed the above.

Starting Official Source Guides

Other Resources To Review

Migration Issues

Hosting

Public documentation is at:

Customer Documentation is in the support portal. The url is, you'll need a support portal account to login with:

  • https://support.zimbra.com/ccaredocs
    • Has, as of today (Oct 15, 2008)
      • Hosted Customer Care Application Guide
      • Hosted Integration Guide
        • Branding Instructions are located here.
      • Hosted Zimbra Web Client Guide
      • Support Program Plan
      • Zimbra Hosted Packaging Options

Hosting Bugs And RFE's

Use this url to see the "public" bugs & rfe's that are tied to hosting.

This will pull all of them regardless of their "status".

License issues (Dos/Unix New Lines)

vi file and then

:set list

Confirm your not getting the ^M characters at the end.

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