This is the second part to my previous post “Migrating Zimbra to Rackspace Cloud from Dedicated Rackspace Server” – I decided to put up separate posts as the first one was already pretty long.  After receiving the updated instructions I uninstalled the existing installation and set out to start over.    One cool thing about the cloud is when I decided to start fresh, through my control panel, I can just rebuild the machine to the fresh install.  I did this and set out to migrate again.  I ran into several problems along the way, but they were mostly just random things – some having to do w/ migration and some just with installing on Ubuntu.  In case anyone else runs into them I’ll outline the issues and the solution:

• LDAP time out errors
  Since I was migrating from one server to another, I wanted to get the second server setup before taking the other completely offline.  This meant that the DNS for the hostname was still technically pointed to the old server.  Once I manually put in an entry in the hosts file pointing the mail server domain name to the local public IP address, the timeouts went away and the install completed normally.
• libpcre3 missing
  During the install process it complained, though it did not error out, about this missing library.  Simply doing an apt-get to install it fixed this error.
• Helpful Hint – Logins / Password from the old server
  One thing in the instructions provided that you need to do is get your LDAP / MySQL passwords and your accounts used for spam / not spam.  To do this, on the old server:

  zmprov gacf | grep -i account

  And to get the ldap passwords:

  zmlocalconfig -s | grep -i password

  Much thanks to ZImbra support for that tip!  Made things much easier.

• SMTP Freezes after MAIL FROM
  The install and migration of the files went relatively smoothly.  When I fired things backup I did a manual telnet to port 25 to check that it was receiving mail.  The SMTP server would just freeze after I issued the MAIL FROM.  I decided to take a page from the other migration guide that said after you had finished migration to re-run the installation script.  After doing so this problem cleared.
• parts_decode_ext FAILED: Unix utility file
  Finally mail was being accepted, but I noticed it was all getting deferred.  After looking at the error message, “zimbra parts_decode_ext fail,” and doing a search – it turns out it was missing “file” a command line tool.  Again using apt-get to install file cleared this up.
• Cleaning up
  I then had to do some random clean up stuff, like adjusting the IPs that were allowed to relay to include the IP of the mail server.  Finally, some mail was getting deferred because it was trying to deliver it to the old mail server.  Once I finally switched the DNS (I had put the TTL down to 5 min) this cleared up.

So, I now have a successfully running mail server on the Rackspace Cloud.    It will be interesting to see how this performs vs. our dedicated server.  It feels much speedier already, but we’ll see how that goes as time passes.  Stay tuned.

P.S. Much thanks to Santosh Rao w/ Zimbra Support for his help during this process.

Update: Whoops!  One snag.  Road Runner is blocking the IP address of this new server – so we can’t get e-mail to road runner accounts!  http://security.rr.com/cgi-bin/block-lookup?67.23.29.240 Working w/ RackSpace to resolve this, though it is cumbersome via a chat-only support system.  Wish it had a “ticket” system like classic Rackspace.