Kolab Express

Thursday, 15 July 2004  |  daniel molkentin

While Kolab 2 promises an easy installation, I always thought Kolab 1 was a bitch to set up. When I tried to set it up and build it from scratch, it took me more than a day and it was really bad. The fortunate thing is: It's not any longer a pain to get your Kolab running. You can now set up a Kolab Server while watching the evening news.

"How does this work out?", you might ask. Well, the fine guys at ZfOS have made Kolab installation much more convinient. They have packages available for all mainstream distributions. Even if your Distribution is not covered, their "obmtool" (OpenPKG poor man's Boot, Build & Management Tool) makes it easy to setup an entire Kolab in three easy steps:

  1. Get the packages (one-by-one or in a convinient tarball)
  2. run ./obmtool kolab
  3. run /kolab/etc/kolab_bootstrap -b

Now you can already fine-tune the server the webinterface at https://server/admin/ or attach your Clients.

Installation on my SUSE 9.0 box (including the bootstrapping process which does the setup) took 15 minutes. Immediately I was able to browse the admin interface. That's a radical improvement over the full day I spent before. As a matter of fact, Kolab2 uses obmtool, too. Thanks ZfOS!