[Kolab-devel] A little help when you need to debug Kolab 2

[Matt Douhan]

Hello all

first of all, thanks Bernhard for taking the time to debug the other day :)

The things I learned from that I put into a small document, it may be the case 
that it will benefit others in similar situations.

rgds

Matt
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Debugging the Kolab 2 Server

After spending many hours one day debuggin a problem I had with the Kolab 2 server I decided to put this together in order to aid others like me to debug problems.

Some of this information may be FreeBSD specific (location of syslog, etc) but never the less the concept should be easily adapted to your own OS.

1. in order to get debug output from the Kolab 2 server you will need to raise the log level from its default value to the new value of 100, this is done by editing the file /kolab/etc/kolab/kolab.globals and changin the log_level line to read "log_level : 100" this will make the Kolab server log debug messages to syslog.

2. To capture the debug output from step 1 I added the following line to my /etc/syslog.conf 
"*.* /var/log/all.log"
make sure to touch /var/log/all.log and chmod it to mode 600 before it will work.

3. For good measures I restarted syslogd and kolab just to make sure the changes took effect, syslogd can be restarted by issueing the kill -HUP command to the running syslogd process.

Kolab I restarted using 
/kolab/bin/openpkg rc all stop followed by /kolab/bin/openpkg rc all start

4. This is the basic setup to start debugging your setup, depending on your problem the next steps may vary from case to case but knowing the locations of log files will help so I will try and point you to the right direction.

5. The log files in Kolab are a bit distributed but by knowing where to look it will make life a lot easier, as a general rule they are all kept in /kolab/var/*/log/, where * can be kolab, apache, imapd or any other part of Kolab.

6. Other useful tools are as follows:

If your problem is creating mailboxes and the error you are getting is ERROR=Permission Denied try to create a mailbox manually using cyradm, syntax is "/kolab/bin/cyradm -user manager -server localhost" use the manager password you assigned from the kolab_bootstrap to login.
At the localhost.domain.com prompt try to add a mailbox manually "cm user/matt at domain.com" this will immediatly tell you if the problem still persists.

If creation of mailboxes have succeeded you should have your domain listed in "/kolab/var/imapd/spool/domain/"

If your problem seems to be LDAP related, use the "/kolab/sbin/slapcat" command and examine the output carefully.

7. Check the bugtracker at www.kolab.org to see if others have already reported your problem and might have a solution or a workaround for it, maybe a developer is already trying to solve the problemem, logging duplicates makes noone happy so please take the time to go through the list before logging a new bug.

8. If you are still unable to determine the problem, then collect all the information you can and send it to kolab-devel at kolab.org, always tell what version of Kolab you are using, if you are using Kolab2 always specify the date of the snapshots you are testing, for example "20040803"