My Kolab 2.4 experience on Centos 6

[Troy Carpenter]

On Thursday, July 19, 2012 01:18:02 PM you wrote:

> > > Z-Push requires you to login with your uid attribute value (the default 
is
> > > to use the surname of a user). I know this is somewhat confusing, as
> > > Kolab 2.3 installations used the email address as the uid attribute
> > > value.
> > 
> > That's too bad.
> 
> Yes, with our Z-Push replacement Syncroton, we seek to implement 
> authentication along the lines of what we've defined in our documentation[1].
> 
> [1] http://docs.kolab.org/en-
> US/Kolab_Groupware/2.4/html/Architecture_and_Design/chap-
> Architecture_and_Design-Authentication_amp_Authorization.html#sect-
> Architecture_and_Design-Authentication_amp_Authorization-
> The_User_Supplied_Login
> 
> > My system is setup mainly for my family, so my uid is
> > "carpenter", and every other user has the same with a number appended.
> > Very annoying. I did figure out how to unlock the fields in the new user
> > screen and I did see that uid can be modified that way, but I never figured
> > out where the uid was being automatically generated.  I will experiment
> > with some custom UIDs to see what happens.
> 
> As of today it's actually being generated using a hard-coded routine in the 
> API (see /usr/share/kolab-webadmin/lib/api/kolab_api_service_form_value.php, 
> private function generate_uid()).
> 
> We have an outstanding feature request to allow specifying how the uid 
should 
> be generated - #677[2] - see the attachment[3] for a test implementation 
that 
> you could execute from the command-line.

I'll have a look at that shortly.

After "unlocking" the user screen, I was able to manually change the UID to be 
the same as the username portion of the email address of my users.  That seems 
to be more compatible with the many "new account" wizards on various devices, 
and seems to work just fine with ActiveSync.

I did a swap-over last night from 2.3.4 to 2.4.  Neither Outlook nor Kontact 
handled it very well in place.  The easiest thing for everyone to do was to 
delete their old accounts in their devices and re-add them (I tried to keep 
the server hostname the same to try to make it seamless but the folder 
structure was different enough that the IMAP clients balked).  I eventually 
made sure that the account passwords were different from the old to new servers 
so that the clients didn't automatically connect and get to a bad place.

Note that I only have 11 users on my Kolab server.  I would hate to have to do 
all that on a large scale.

Thanks for all the work!

Troy Carpenter