Hi Ken,

Thanks for yout work, got it up runnin without warnings , downloaded jgraph and installed it ( I think the newest version... i'll try, if it does not work, I'll know why ;-) ), tnef and php_mcrypt issues are solved.

Christoph:

On another odd note, the email notice I got regarding this post shows you are looking to install jpgraph, but the posting here shows tnef; wierd

If you are looking to install jpgraph, you MUST use the older version (mine is 3.0.x) I tried with a newer version the first time around - no good.

Also it has to be installed PARALLEL to egw (ie /var/www/html/jpgraph not /var/www/html/egroupware/jpgraph)

HTH
Ken

Hi

This thread has been pretty quiet, so you might have better luck over on the EGW forums. I use the old-school mailing list, as some of the developers monitor it, and will usually respond within a couple of days.

Just an FYI - still using EGW on Clear, and I am a happy camper. Have been using it to manage workflow in my department, and will soon be rolling out into production for whole organization. I have tested EGW on many different hosts, and other that a caution about only using EGW Admin to create new users (not within ClearOS panel) Clear has by far been the best/easiest implementation. Zentyal/Ebox was almost there, but then abandoned EGW in favor of a simpler to maintain suite.

hope this was a little helpful
Ken

Hi, there are two problems left with my egw on a fresh ClearOS5.2 with upgraded php :

How can I install mcrypt and tnef ??

Thanks in advance,

Christoph

Thanks Dongers

I don't recall having to do that on my recent install, but I am sure that in a year from now, I will slam head-on into something similar....
Ken

Just checked out the EGW forums, wanna know the fix....?

You need to select the language using the drop down at the top of the config page before the buttons are enabled!!!!

Like I'm actually going to change it from English when its already selected!!!!

Anyway, on to the rest of my config now!!!!

cheers

Dongers

Yes...that darned documentation...been through the same; get it working, a year later do same task but have forgotten steps.....

I feel your pain :silly:

Ken

Thanks Ken, but I can't download it.....the buttons simply don't work....I can't even view it.. :-S

If I could view I could just cut n paste it....

Tried it with IE and Opera (and checked for pop ups being blocked too ;-) )

Need to wrack my brain to work out what I did last time!!!! (and document it!!!)

cheers

Dongers

Hi Dongers

When I followed the recipe, I made sure I did nothing else but download php header file, then re-upload & set permissions. It is very fussy about this step. Anything else was a no-go.

FWIW, I am very pleased with how this setup is working - several folks at work are wanting to start using EGW ASAP despite still being in testing phase. Following the cautions here, I have been very careful to not perform any user management in ClearOS after I started creating users in EGW.

On a different tack, I have been experiencing a weird date/time problem, but that seems to be due to a bug in ClearOS as a virtual machine guest, rather than an EGW artifact.

regards
Ken

Has anyone had any issues with creating their header file?

Got all the dependencies for PHP sorted (thanks Tim), can connect to the header configuration page, but cannot preview, generate or view it once I have filled in all the details..? The buttons just don't work!

I'm SURE I had this before with 1.6, but didn't document what I did to get round it, D'oh!

Pretty sure it is something to do with the PHP version, or something I haven't set correctly within php.ini, but all the install checks pass OK, so I'm kinda stuck....

Anyone have any suggestions..?

Cheers

Dongers

Tim Burgess wrote:

try :-

yum install eGroupware

Hi Tim,

And thanks for quick response. I have already d/l'd & installed rpms from sourceforge, but I did use your repo & instructions for the PHP upgrade; that was painless- thanks again.

I used jpgraph from the OpenSusu repo.

This time, when I ran the "test installation" in EGW, there were NO red X's the very first time. whoo-hoo! B)

Now to build the d/b's and start filling containers...

regards
Ken

try :-

yum install eGroupware

I wanted to start a clean-sheet install with better host resource allocations, and tried to follow the (hopefully) better method that Kevin offered, but encountered a new set of problems with the repo. See notes below.

Kevin Bednar wrote:

Quick hack to install egroupware 1.8.001 on ClearOS 5.2

Dependencies:
Install the following to resolve some php dependencies for
dom, mcrypt, etc.

yum install openldap-devel

PHP prerequisites

Edit /etc/php.ini and make the following changes.
Set upload_max_filesize=12M
Set post_max_filesize=12M
Set mbstring.func_overload=7 to allow use of utf-8 characters
Uncomment date.timezone in the "Modules settings" area and set to your tz,
like date.timezone=America/New_York
See PHP docs if you need more info.

2 PEAR modules needed to be installed.

pear install Auth_SASL
pear install XML_Feed_Parser

At this point all prerequisites for the install should be installed. Now
to install egroupware itself.

First, the latest version of egroupware can be installed via the repository. Much easier.
To add the repo to your COS machine do the following:
cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
wget http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/server:/eGroupWare/CentOS_5/server:eGroupWare.repo

This will add the egroupware repo to your yum
To install simply run yum -y install egroupware

THIS STEP IS ALREADY BROKEN - ERROR MESSAGE:
the repo added fine, but whatever script was involved got lost....

[root@mail yum.repos.d]# yum -y install egroupware
Loading "protect-packages" plugin
Loading "kmod" plugin
base-kernels | 951 B 00:00
base-updates | 951 B 00:00
server_eGroupWare | 1.3 kB 00:00
primary.xml.gz | 8.5 kB 00:00
server_eGr: ################################################## 64/64
clearcentos-os | 951 B 00:00
base-supplements | 951 B 00:00
base-os | 1.1 kB 00:00
clearcentos-updates | 951 B 00:00
base-console | 951 B 00:00
Setting up Install Process
Parsing package install arguments
No package egroupware available. <<<<<<<<<<<
Nothing to do
[root@mail yum.repos.d]#

You will see a list of all the files scroll by and it will start installing. Once completed you need to make a few changes before you access it from your COS machine.
The repo install will place egroupware in /usr/share/egroupware/ which isn't going to work well for us. Rather than move files around which is a PITA and will break yum repo upgrades down the road we will create a symlink to the actual install. This way when we install a new version we won't have to copy things all over again, etc. To create the link do the following:

ln -st /var/www/html/ /usr/share/egroupware/
Note the above html dir, it is correct. The line will create a symlink called egroupware in that directory since we used the -st on the command line. Otherwise if you create a dir of the same name before you create a link and try /var/www/html/egroupware/ it will actually end up another level down where the symlink is, ie: /var/www/html/egroupware/egroupware/

Once this is done you should be able to go to http://<yourfirewallname>/egroupware and complete the install. See the egroupware site if you need further info. You can ignore the yellow notices about the oracle and mssql drivers unless you are using them.

Also, please note, this is NOT integrated with COS authentication. Althought egroupware supports using ldap, I do not personally use it and so didn't not bother trying to integrate it. It was just to see if I could get it up and running and usable for my purposes. If it helps someone get it working then that's cool.

Kevin

There was also a bunch of alerts about using "pear channel-update" rather than "pear update", but the explanations and/or fixes I found did not make any sense to me.

Back to beginnings......

I have included this info for anyone else looking to install EGW on Clear, and will try to document & post my steps.

regards
Ken

Thank you Ruud,

I appreciate the feedback. I will look at SOGO, but I do need a resource scheduling module, and the ability to integrate email/calendar/and resources is tough to find. Zimbra offers it, but last time I checked, it was an odd kludge, and using it was not intuitive.

The is another groupware called simple office which I have not yet tried, but will look into.

EGW has so much going for it. I wish it would play nicely with the other kids. :unsure:

regards
Ken

Hi Ken,

speaking of my own experience.... I have loved eGroupWare and the fact that it uses all the components of ClearOS (like mail, ldap, apche, php, etc.)
but there have been some 'hickups' for me that made it not so 'out-of-the-box-and-on-top-of-it': upgrading php, accounts getting 'crippled' so that they once used with eGroupWare are not maintainable under ClearOS, syncml not working and needs funambol client 'hack', etc. The discussion is always like the 'chicken-and-egg' discussion.... which I completely understand but in the end does not solve my problem

So I started looking into another groupware package and ended up with SOGo (thanks kevin ).
This offers a very good user experience, and is I experience it now better integrated.
It lacks the virtual users drives, but I have overcome this problem by using the flexshare for this purpose (which works very well).

So after extensive testing I did a yum remove eGroupWare and never looked back...

If you want to go down the eGroupWare route on a separate environment, that will solve php dependencies, but not your ldap woes.

Hope this helps somehow.
regards,
Ruud.

Hi all

Despite the pains of installing eGroupware, (the only time it EVER worked out-of-the-box for me was ebox 1.4.) it is the only ERP/Collaboration package I have found that offers what SMB's need. I have also used COS since the old ClarkConnect 2.x days - most often to replace NT/2000/2003 servers. I seem to keep coming back to this distro whenever "I need a server that just works, dammit!"

Yesterday, thanks to the work of Ruud, and some googling successfully installed EGW 1.8 (the hard way, as I didn't read Kevin's fix until this morning).

Setup
ClearOS 5.2 VM in Virtualbox 4
EGW 1.8

I had to do some hacking to get PHP5.2x installed, while praying it didn't break ClearOS - I have forgotten where I found the info, but a fellow named Tim Burgess supplied a repo & tips for the install. HERE it is

I never did get jpgraph installed. The EGW setup script kept complaining about it being needed for Project module - I would still like to fix this as we wish to use that module.

Also had to fix some links due to directory tree changes (I think Kevin's guide bypasses that)

Now it is working, and I am using LDAP for accounts. When I create a user in EGW, they are added in Clear, and I have not yet seen much problems with the user accounts, but I have not gotten very complex with that. I preferentially create them in Clear, then assign permissions in EGW.

A problem I have encountered, which I think comes from my misunderstanding of virtual folders, is that user files uploaded in EGW are not appearing in their home folder that is accessing via Samba or SFTP (the *nix /home/username/userfiles). It is desirable to merge these somehow, so that users can manage their files in their familiar way when at work, and just use the EGW file manager when off-site.

This will very soon become a production system, but I am merely doing a demonstration for people at the present, and can tear down & rebuild whatever is necessary at the present. When this does move to production, we will be purchasing a commercial version. I will have to choose between the ClearOS/EGW setup, and the offer from Stylite to sell me a VM with all the structure ready to roll.

A couple of years ago, I took a serious try at learning LDAP. What I learned is that despite years of server admin, hacking away at just about every linux distro out there, successfully building a linux-from-scratch in the days of dial-up (pre-google, pre-liveCD, etc), I simply cannot get my brain to comprehend LDAP. Having a server (ClearOS, Zentyal) that allows me to ignore that BS and just start building users & groups is fine by me.

Having said all that, I am looking for some feedback regarding the architecture. I have positive feelings about ClearOS's ability to act as our LDAP/email server, but kludging EGW onto Clear concerns me in the longer term vis-a-vis updates. Would it make more sense to have stand-alone ClearOS for LDAP accounts & email, then use a dedicated EGW host that defers to the ClearOS server for users & email?

Thanks to all who have done the work & posted their experiences here.

regards
Ken

Hi Kevin,

Thanks for the Quick version.

Unfortunately, I am starting from a scratch install of ClearOS 5.2....

I have done all OS updates and upgrades, via the manager and yum. I have muddled my way through php, pear, and still am killing myself at this point in the dependencies process.

Could I prevail upon you to do a step-by-step process from a clean install? I think that your platforms have gotten a great deal of conditioning along the way that is not immediately apparent in your quick and dirty howto.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! I am looking forward to a yum based install!!!!! My current version of eGroupWare is running on Ubuntu 9.04, and I am terrified to muck with it. Also, I am trying to retire as much of the "old" infrastructure as possible. The docs at Stylite are now nearly useless (probably by design)....

Please help!

Thanks,

Chris.

Kevin,

thanks for your how-to.
I am using the LDAP authentication and it works. Loving the preview window btw

regards,
Ruud.

Quick hack to install egroupware 1.8.001 on ClearOS 5.2

Dependencies:
Install the following to resolve some php dependencies for
dom, mcrypt, etc.

yum install openldap-devel

PHP prerequisites

Edit /etc/php.ini and make the following changes.
Set upload_max_filesize=12M
Set post_max_filesize=12M
Set mbstring.func_overload=7 to allow use of utf-8 characters
Uncomment date.timezone in the "Modules settings" area and set to your tz,
like date.timezone=America/New_York
See PHP docs if you need more info.

2 PEAR modules needed to be installed.

pear install Auth_SASL
pear install XML_Feed_Parser

At this point all prerequisites for the install should be installed. Now
to install egroupware itself.

First, the latest version of egroupware can be installed via the repository. Much easier.
To add the repo to your COS machine do the following:
cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
wget http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/server:/eGroupWare/CentOS_5/server:eGroupWare.repo

This will add the egroupware repo to your yum
To install simply run yum -y install egroupware

You will see a list of all the files scroll by and it will start installing. Once completed you need to make a few changes before you access it from your COS machine.
The repo install will place egroupware in /usr/share/egroupware/ which isn't going to work well for us. Rather than move files around which is a PITA and will break yum repo upgrades down the road we will create a symlink to the actual install. This way when we install a new version we won't have to copy things all over again, etc. To create the link do the following:

ln -st /var/www/html/ /usr/share/egroupware/
Note the above html dir, it is correct. The line will create a symlink called egroupware in that directory since we used the -st on the command line. Otherwise if you create a dir of the same name before you create a link and try /var/www/html/egroupware/ it will actually end up another level down where the symlink is, ie: /var/www/html/egroupware/egroupware/

Once this is done you should be able to go to http://<yourfirewallname>/egroupware and complete the install. See the egroupware site if you need further info. You can ignore the yellow notices about the oracle and mssql drivers unless you are using them.

Also, please note, this is NOT integrated with COS authentication. Althought egroupware supports using ldap, I do not personally use it and so didn't not bother trying to integrate it. It was just to see if I could get it up and running and usable for my purposes. If it helps someone get it working then that's cool.

Kevin

Hi,

after some weeks of running a RC version of eGroupWare 1.8.001 There was a 'green-light for the final release. Below is the mail I received.

When I have some time I will write some upgrade instruction, the new version works via a maintained (centos) package and that makes life a lot easier

regards,
Ruud.

What's new in EGroupware v1.8?

It contains many improvements AND lot's of bugfixes over the 1.6 release.

* Inclusion of postinstall script from EPL (automatic install/update)
* Full timezone support including recurring events
* Visualisation of participant status of events, mark invitations
* EMail 3PaneView, folder tree in sidebox, import ical/vcard onclick,
select all messages in folder
* Infolog: print view and copying of InfoLogs
* Addressbook mergeprint supports now MS- and OpenOffice xml formats
* SiteMgr: support for Joomla! 1.5 templates and new default website
incl. a sitemgr tutorial
* Many useful extensions and adaptations as well as bug-fixes in all modules
* for a full list and for technical details see the changelog
(www.egroupware.org/changelog)

Recommended installation is now via server:eGroupware repository from
openSUSE build service:

* SUSE: openSUSE 11.* or SLES 10/11
* Red Hat: Fedora 12/3, RHEL 5/6 or CentOS 5
* Mandriva 2008-10
* Debian 5
* Ubuntu 8.04 to 10.04

Super,

thanks for working on this!.
Currently testing the 'new-and improved' eGroupWare 1.8.001 (RC), nothing but goods things up to now. When the final hits the internet I will update this thread and how-to.

thanks again.
regards,
Ruud.

Thanks for your work on this Guys, much appreciated!

Hi everyone!

Peter has very kindly looked into the "objectClass" error when modifying ClearOS LDAP for Zarafa. I believe a similar fix will apply here also for eGroupware, which will mean that the webconfig user management will work again.

It won't fix the DN issue for users modified within eGroupware, but as a work around will at least you'll be able to create and edit users again via the normal webconfig methods

http://www.clearfoundation.com/component/option,com_kunena/Itemid,232/catid,10/func,view/id,16000/#18597

Check the thread for more information on the DN format.

I am not an expert but some educated googling...It appears that both methods are equally acceptable methods of defining the LDAP structure, *except* when it comes to authentication directly using LDAP.

The reason being that the authenticataion does not permit any kind of searching, where other other tools can easily use the UID or CN (by varying their search methods within the base DN tree structure) to determine the correct entry. Usually the only requirement is to set the DN to something useful and consistent to prevent needless searching.

This has some more details
http://www.zytrax.com/books/ldap/apa/binddn.html
http://www.zytrax.com/books/ldap/apa/dn-rdn.html

Hi Stuart,

My guess is that you are right, although I have read somewhere that the way ClearOS implements the DN is also correct (?).

I have had a conversation with Ralph Becker from eGroupware and they are not likely to change the way they implement it.

I am not sure how to change or what the impact of the change in ClearOS would be if it was to be changed in here?
I can imagine that there will be other applications that are ldap compliant (eGroupware conforms fully to the phpldapadmin standards: [look at last download link]) will have problems when running on ClearOS.

But then again, who can tell?

shout-out: Is there any developer who can estimate what the impact would be to change this from within ClearOS and is willing to have a quick look at this?

regards,
Ruud.

Ruud,

To be honest I would have to say that the ClearOS directory structure is not exactly right.

a DN is supposed to be a unique directory entry that is not true with ClearOS but is true with eGroupware.

http://www.ldapman.org/articles/intro_to_ldap.html

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc977992.aspx

Brad wrote:

Hello, I have the same issue as below but it looks as though ToyataHEAD settled on it being a Pear issue but never shared the solution, my symptons are identical I am running release 5.2
...
[Any help much appreciated.

Hi Brad, isn't THIS the solution to your issue?

regards,
Ruud.

Hello, I have the same issue as below but it looks as though ToyataHEAD settled on it being a Pear issue but never shared the solution, my symptons are identical I am running release 5.2

ToyotaHEAD wrote:

* What does 'nothing happens' mean: you click the button and really nothing happpens, or clicking the button returns you to the header creation page? Yes this is what i mean

* When running the installation tests, did you get any errors / warnings that you didn't fix? No errors were reported by the installation check.

* What happens when you try filling in the information a second time (have read a posting on the egroupware forum that this could do the trick)? I tried many different times at filling out the fields. Same thing happens each time. Figured it might have been a bummed install / downloaded file. Re downloaded the file, extracted, and reinstalled to web browser. Same issue persists.

* As this routine of creating the header.inc.php is a php routine, do you see any errors in your apache log that could give some pointer as where to look? The Apache log was clear.

* What version of ClearOS are you running? The latest 5.1 Final

Any help much appreciated.

Marçon wrote:

Quick post to say that i've been powned by the cut/paste function during header.inc.php creation (php parse error due to breaklines introduced within commentaries) which gave me a blank page...(stupid error) :blush:

Hi Marçon,

thanks for sharing this here, good feedback!

regards,
Ruud.

Quick post to say that i've been powned by the cut/paste function during header.inc.php creation (php parse error due to breaklines introduced within commentaries) which gave me a blank page...(stupid error) :blush:

Christer Jonassen wrote:

Okay, thanks for the heads up Russ

I should have read more than just the first page of this thread before I started installing it, but fortunately it did not make any serious damage.

Hi Christer,

I have updated the first post (under tips and tricks) to avoid this.
Unfortunately to late for you, but thanks for pointing it out... is bound to happen to somebody else.

As for a possible permanent fix.... I am having trouble to find the time to learn ldap and everything associated with it and am still hoping somebody (can you hear me calling ) will jump in and help out.

I am very satisfied with the combination, not as stated before just for email, but for everything that ClearOS has to offer (except the samba part: I am running linux only) and everything that eGroupWare has to offer (email, calendar, virtual filesystem, address book, synchml server (for synhronizing address book with my android phone)

regards,
Ruud.

If you fix it let me know please

Have a good weekend

Russ

Okay, thanks for the heads up Russ

I should have read more than just the first page of this thread before I started installing it, but fortunately it did not make any serious damage.

Just to clarify, I was not running Active Directory, just the built in Windows Networking capabilities (samba) in ClearOS (Which is quite similar to AD though). It kinda scared me that I was unable to make any changes in the "Windows Settings" menu in the ClearOS webconfig. There is obviously some conflict in the way egroupware interacts with the ClearOS samba config.

Hi Christer,

I have never gotten around the LDAP issue with using eGroupware but have found, with help from Ruud and the other helpful people on this forum, that eGroupware and ClearOS get on 'sort of'!

Yes, i still get the 'object violation' error but if you just allow eGroupware to manage the users and if you wish to do no more than run it as a Mailserver and eGW server then it works fine.

I do not link it to Active Directory, which I think you mentioned earlier, and would be a little reluctant to do so because of the issues. However, because I just using the LDAP built in to ClearOS I can live with the small problems.
However, I have not experienced the pther issue you reported so can not comment on that one.

Would be nice to have proper fix though as I'm sure for an LDAP expert it would be a very simple problem to remedy

Cheers
Russ

[i]Ooops! :lol: I see that many of the issues in my post here already has been mentioned in this earlier in this thread! Oh well, I'll leave my original post here incase there is something useful in it[/i]

Original post:

Hi!

Not sure if I should post this here or make a new topic, anyways..

My experience with egroupware on ClearOS 5.1 was not so good unfortunately. I followed your excellent how-to and the installation went smooth, but it seems to me that egroupware makes dangerous changes if you choose to modify a user made in clearos with egroupware.

Example:
I had a user called "someperson" which I wanted to give access to egroupware for testing. I logged in as admin in egroupware and ticked of permissions to use calendar, groupdav etc. Later on I discover that the useraccount had suddenly lost virtually all group memberships(Groups made with webconfig). This also rendered "someperson"'s Windows domain user pretty much useless (because my setup reads groupmemberships in order to map the right sambashares during logon for the different usergroups)

I thought I only had to reasign the groupmemberships with webconfig tofix it, but when I try to do that on a user that has been given access to egroupware modules, I get a "Object class violation" error when I click Update on the memberships: [img size=Screenshot]http://downloads.csdnserver.com/img/ObjClassViol.png[/img]

Investigating further, with LDAPExplorerTool2 (can be downloaded from sourceforge), I see that the the user is now "uid=someperson", instead of "cn=someperson" that It should have been (The other users on the system is has cn=)

LDAP entries of "someperson":
[img size=Screenshot]http://downloads.csdnserver.com/img/someperson.png[/img]

LDAP entries of a test user that has not been given egroupware rights:
[img size=Screenshot]http://downloads.csdnserver.com/img/anotherperson.png[/img]

So im guessing this is why I get an error from webconfig

I'm also afraid that egroupware cause this error I get now when I try to change any setting for the Windows Domain services:
[img size=Screenshot]http://downloads.csdnserver.com/img/WindowsDomainError.png[/img]

Luckily, this was only a temporary lab setup, which I had to erase in either case, so it doesn't matter anymore, but I wanted to share it here to get some clues in what went wrong.

Hope this long post at least made some sense

russ smith wrote:

....I'm sure it's just a case of getting ClearOS to understand the EGW added LDAP objects, (see my earlier post) or removing those objects so that ClearOS doesn't complain.....

Or... have eGW conform to the ClearOS standards.... Feels like the 'chicken and egg' discussion...

I feel that eGW should act in a non-intrusive way on the OS and other applications: that is one of the strenghts of eGW....
If we are able to explain what is happening 'behind the scenes' and are able to reproduce at will, than we can start to discuss with either (or both) ClearOS / eGW development on how to solve or workaround....

if this is fixed, next step is to make a ClearOS package (maintained) of eGW :woohoo:

regards,
Ruud.

Hi,

thanks for the advice Guys, that got it working.
Reason it wasn't working was because for Zarafa you have to alter your main and master config files in the postfix folder to redirect the mail to Zarafa, removed these settings and now working fine.


Russ

Hi Guys,

thanks will try that.

Just to update, I changed my group membership in EGW very slightly and now have the 'object violation' error once more

Nevertheless stll perfectly useable but would be nice to cure that error finally, will continue to look into myself.
I'm sure it's just a case of getting ClearOS to understand the EGW added LDAP objects, (see my earlier post) or removing those objects so that ClearOS doesn't complain.

Thanks
Russ

I have used this maildrop module for some time, and its working flawless :-)