SME Server 8

Announcing Koozali SME Server 8 series is discontinued
The Koozali SME Server development team is announcing the discontinuation of the Koozali SME Server 8.x series as per
March 31, 2017.

Please see this post for more information.

The Koozali SME Server project

The Koozali Foundation Inc. is a nonprofit corporation that governs the open source Koozali SME Server project. Koozali SME Server is a stable, secure and easy to use/manage linux server that provides common server functionalities out of the box. Many open source contributions are available that can extend the default server functionality making Koozali SME Server an even more powerful and flexible business server solution. Thousands of Koozali SME Severs have been deployed as real or virtual servers and in the cloud to serve many small to medium enterprises, and this number is growing day by day. The Koozali SME Server is free to use but it takes a lot of effort and money to develop, make, and maintain. We therefore ask you for your considerations.

Volunteering

Koozali Foundation Inc. together with its community hosted at https://contribs.org is a collaborative effort of volunteers. You too can contribute to the development and continuity of the Koozali SME Server project as described on our volunteering page. Everybody is welcome to join the already 4000+ member contribs.org community and can contribute with any skill set.

Financial donations

You can also show your support by making financial donations. The preferred way to make financial donations is using the donate option in the forums. You are free to choose any amount and frequency, being monthly, yearly or only once. The benefit of donating through your forums account is that your forum user name will receive a badge, showing your donation status. If you do not have a forum account, you can create one, or select the below PayPal option to make your donations.

Commercial usage

Organizations that use Koozali SME Server for their business, provide professional services related to SME Server or in any other way benefit commercially from the Koozali SME Server project, are kindly requested to consider regular financial donations that reflect their business benefits.

Koozali Foundation Inc. is happy to supply an invoice for any donations received. For more information on invoicing please send a mail to treasurer@koozali.org.

Thank you for your considerations and support!

Status: Final Release

SME Server Version 8.0 is the current major version of SME Server, and is based on CentOS 5.8. http://wiki.contribs.org/SME_Server:About

See the Release Announcement for 8.0 Final.

A copy of the latest CD image can be downloaded here.

SME Server 8.1beta2

Due to the large number and size of updates for SME 8.0, we are working on a new installer ISO to include all updates of CentOS 5.9 in SME Server 8.1. Please, use only for test purpose to help with development. You should read these notes to be aware of any and all new features.

See this wiki page to download the ISO.

Testing

All users are encouraged to test, see our draft quality assurance testing page for tasks SME8.0 QA

All testing should be based on the released version plus updates from smeupdates-testing.

Considerations before installing

	Note:
	After installing the 8.0 final release, users should ensure that smeupdates-testing repo is disabled in the server-manager panel, if it was previously enabled during beta testing.

	Note:
	You are advised to only upgrade clean machines, e.g. without contribs or other modifications. If any contribs is installed you must remove them; you may re-install contribs after upgrade. All contribs settings are saved in /etc/e-smith/templates or /etc/e-smith/templates-custom so when you re-install any contrib settings will be retrieved.

See Bugzilla: 6732 and Bugzilla: 7056

	Note:
	Before performing an upgrade to SME 8 from version 7.xx you need to fully update the installation of version 7.xx before attempting the upgrade.

Please report any issues to our bug tracker under the SME Server 8 section only if you have installed all current updates.

This way all problems can be fixed as quickly, early and efficiently as possible by the development team.

Contrib owners/maintainers should check their packages for compatibility on SME Server 8.0 final and update them if necessary.

For comments regarding contrib test results on previous SME8beta releases see SME8.0 Contribs QA

Upgrade paths

Check for rpms installed from outside the standard yum repositories and remove at least all contribs:

/sbin/e-smith/audittools/newrpms

CD

This is the most affordable way to get a clean and secure upgrade. During the upgrade process the existing installation is detected and the option to upgrade the existing system is displayed.

If upgrading with less than SME Server 8.0 Beta 6, reset repositories to SME 8, see below, bug bugzilla:5705. This is fixed for SME Server 8.0 Beta 6

Yum

Even if possible and tested the yum upgrade must be performed only with stable internet connections and, above all, not remotely. Loosing connection may leave your system in an unknown state.

Check for known issues, here SME8.0 QA and at open bugs for SME 8 in bugzilla.

Note especially bugzilla:5316, detach all USB drives, ie your backup

Pointing repositories to SME 8

Update the MirrorList property to point to the sme8 lists...

db yum_repositories print | grep '^sme' | cut -d= -f1 | while read repo
do
    db yum_repositories setprop $repo MirrorList \
    http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/smeserver/mirrorlist/$repo-8
done

Expand your yum.conf...

/etc/e-smith/events/actions/generic_template_expand yum-modify

Performing the upgrade

	Note:
	You are advised to only upgrade clean machines, e.g. without contribs or other modifications.

1. Clean out the yum cache so upgrades work: yum --enablerepo '*' clean all
2. Perform the upgrade: yum --disablerepo '*' \ $(echo --enablerepo\ sme{os,updates,extras,addons}) \ upgrade
3. Remove outdated rpm database and rebuild it (zeros not O's) rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db.00* rpm --rebuilddb
4. Reset yum updates repositories to defaults, (will delete local changes) mv /home/e-smith/db/yum_repositories /home/e-smith/db/yum_repositories.pre8 /etc/e-smith/events/actions/initialize-default-databases
5. Perform a post-upgrade and reboot signal-event post-upgrade signal-event reboot

Check for contrib packages that may need upgrading

Even though it is recommended that you only upgrade clean machines (e.g. without contribs or other modifications), it may be possible that you have a contrib installed that you forgot about. After the upgrade, use the following command to see if there are any remaining el4 packages installed that may require an upgrade from the smecontribs repository.

rpm -qa | grep el4

Note that some of the contribs packages may be listed as an el4 package but function correctly on SME8. Check the SME8.0_Contribs_QA pages for more information.

Potential issues that may arise

If you are running a 7.0 system you may need to upgrade smeserver-yum.

1. Check which version of smeserver-yum you are running: rpm -q smeserver-yum
2. If it isn't at least 1.2.0-25.el4.sme install an updated version: rpm -Uvh \ http://mirror.contribs.org/smeserver/releases/obsolete/7.1/smeos/i386/CentOS/RPMS/smeserver-yum-1.2.0-25.el4.sme.noarch.rpm \ http://mirror.contribs.org/smeserver/releases/obsolete/7.1/smeos/i386/CentOS/RPMS/yum-plugin-fastestmirror-0.2.4-3.c4.noarch.rpm

If you receive the following error while trying to upgrade:

--> Finished Dependency Resolution
Error: Missing Dependency: yum-metadata-parser is needed by package yum

Solve it by installing the correct version of yum-metadata-parser:

rpm -Uvh --oldpackage \
http://mirror.contribs.org/smeserver/releases/7/smeos/i386/SME/RPMS/yum-metadata-parser-1.0-8.el4.centos.i386.rpm

Upgrading samba

The Samba packages in SME Server 8.0 Beta 6 have reverted to those provided by CentOS to simplify the support needed. This version of samba provides support for Windows 7 domain logins. Due to this change from samba-3.4 to samba3x-3.3 it is necessary to remove samba if samba-3.4.x has been installed. All users of SME Server 8.0 Beta 5 are affected. Users of other versions of SME Server can check their samba version.

rpm -q samba samba3x

Here is the example output showing samba 3.4 packages installed which need removal.

samba-3.4.3-1.1.el5.sme
package samba3x is not installed

Here is the example output showing samba3x 3.3 packages installed which need no further steps

package samba is not installed
samba3x-3.3.8-0.52.el5_5

If samba-3.4.x then you need to run two commands:

rpm -e --nodeps libtalloc libtdb samba samba-client samba-common samba-winbind

yum install tdb-tools

Now you are ready to upgrade to SME Server 8.0 Beta 6

USB drives

USB drives are detected differently on SME8, see http://wiki.contribs.org/USBDisks#USB_on_SME_8

Additional steps and potential changes

VMWare

VMware-server installations now work per the wiki entry, see Vmware. Previous work arounds dated SME8beta5 are no longer required.

Problems and bugs

If you have any bug issues with upgrading please open a new SME Server 8.x file a bug here

Major Changes

• CentOS 5 has dropped support for i586 and therefore SME Server 8 will not work on i586 hardware. See bugzilla:2845. i586 hardware means processors before and including Intel Pentium, Pentium MMX; AMD K5, K6, K6-II, K6-III and Via C3. i686 architecture processors are Intel Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III; AMD Athlon, Athlon XP and later.