[Kolab-devel] horde as kolab's web frontend or not

[Gunnar Wrobel]

Richard Bos <radoeka at xs4all.nl> writes:

> Where is datatree stored?  Is it stored in mysql?  When I dumped the mysql 
> database(s) it did not contain any information...  But I think that is very 
> much explainable as I did not create any calendar, contact, etc data yet.

If you have no groupware folders then that would explain it :) The
datatree is stored in the horde_datatree_* tables.

> But how does an email client like kmail or outlook express do this?  Don't 
> they have the same problems?  I mean they also have to deal with 'not owned 
> shared folders' that get renamed....

They do not store any annotation on the mail folders. There was a text
in the kolab documentation that actually suggested that clients may do
something like horde does it. But I believe that both outlook and
kontact do not need it.

So the question is whether horde really needs it. This is something
that Jan could probably answer. I not yet deep enough into Horde
shares to understand the requirements. But I guess there might be ways
to omit the standard way horde handles shares. If there would be no
need to store additional data on the groupware shares then it would
also be possible to get rid of the datatree.

So far I got the impression that the datatree only stores owner, name,
type and permissions of the shared groupware folders. All that is
already available by accessing the folder on the IMAP server. 

> How much work does that involve, can you estimate this already?  Will you be 
> working on this?  If this functionality gets added or improved, what impact 
> would that have on the kolab configuration tab in horde?  Would that make it 
> possible to remove the bind dn and bind password from that tab?  Or should 
> they be replaced with some other value?

I did work on it but all I did was throw in a really ugly hack that
made internal users work. This will not make it upstream. No promises
concerning the time it will require to convert this into something
more reasonable.

This has a minor impact on the kolab tab and the master binding
credentials could be exchanged against the credentials of the
unpriviledged user.

But to be honest I did not really think much about the kolab
configuration tab. If you have the webmail on the same server as the
kolab system nothing prevents you from using the standard kolabconf
template system for configuring your webmail.

All necessary parameters are readily available within the kolab
configuration and the only parameter you need to set in order to
complete the horde configuration is the mysql db password. The horde
configuration templates that I use are available within my gentoo
overlay.

> ps: In the current (horde) setup, 1 ldap server is assigned to 1 web server 
> serving horde.  Is this okay, is this in line with the kolab philosophy or 
> should an ldap server be assinged per user?  I understand that the latter is 
> hard (perhaps impossible) to do.  

One ldap server per web server. At least that will be the usual
case. If you plan to have a server with a webmail that allows access
to several kolab backend servers you would need a "per user" configuration. 

Cheers

Gunnar

-- 
Gunnar Wrobel                    Gentoo Developer
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