Migrating from Axigen


Introduction

The purpose of this article is to document my experience in migrating a <500 user Axigen mail server setup to Zimbra. I'm not done yet, so anybody who stumbles across this article before it is linked into the Migration category should be very careful with anything you read here. It may or may not be beneficial or useful.

The Setup

The source Axigen mail server is a single Centos 5.8 server. The destination Zimbra setup will be three servers: one mailbox server and two LDAP/MTA/proxy servers. They will all run on CentOS 6 and be installed according to other guides in this wiki.

Migration Strategy

Preliminary tests indicate that using imapsync for mail migration is a viable strategy. Unfortunately, I have not discovered a good method of migrating calendar entries; unless I find something easy between now and deployment I am not going to plan to migrate calendars. Our calendar user population is low enough that we can deal with each on a case-by-case basis.

My current plan is to clone our Axigen server, run the initial imapsync against the clone, and run an additional catch-up imapsync at cutover time.

Notes on imapsync

Imapsync is great if you know everyone's username and password. We authenticate our mail users against Active Directory, so it's not so great for us. However, it is possible to make Axigen authenticate against Zimbra's LDAP server for imapsync purposes. Of course, you will also have to obtain a list of usernames and passwords for Zimbra LDAP; Zimbra makes this easy if you use the migration tool to create accounts from Active Directory.

Configuring Axigen to authenticate against Zimbra

WIP. You have to create a custom schema file for Axigen's LDAP connector to use. This is easy:

LdapSchema {

accountObjectClass = "organizationalPerson"

}

Just make this file, save it somewhere Axigen can read it, and tell Axigen to use it in the LDAP connector.

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