I think I may go down a less elegant, but something I can put together more quickly, method.

I discovered that once I'm logged into the system (it's web based), I can simply browse to the document retrieval URL and stick the appropriate document ID in said URL. This will spit out said document.

I can script this via Lynx on a Linux VM relatively easily.

All we need to do is dump the desired document IDs to a list that I can then read on the Lynx side and, boom, we'll have the docs to do with as we please.

@scottalanmiller said in Reverse Engineer Apache Jackrabbit Setup:

So the MS SQL Server database is overly complex? Hard to believe that the image data is not relatively easy to find in there.

The SQL database appears to be fairly simple. However, it's not in any easy-for-a-human-to-decipher structure (at least this human).

For what it's worth, we used to have a system that used IBM's FileNet for document storage...and I easily reverse engineered the Oracle back-end of that and was able to pull docs from that with no issues.

This is nothing like FileNet, unfortunately.

We have a system that uses Apache Jackrabbit as an image (document) storage repository. We would really like to be able to pull documents for use with applications outside said system. The vendor of the system is, of course, not willing to volunteer how we can do this. So, I've been asked to reverse engineer it. I've looked at the database (MS-SQL) that's being used as storage and, yeah, I need to get into it from the Jackrabbit side...

Anyone have any pointers on resources to help me with this? At least a pointer on where to start?

It goes without saying, I have no clue what I'm doing.

@DustinB3403 said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:

@anthonyh Ah ok so Alike does perform deduplication in the backup process and at backup time.

OK I understand a bit better now.

Yes, sir! It does block deduplication as well as compression. Works pretty well. Full VM restores can take a while though depending on the size of the virtual disks attached to the VM. File-level restores are pretty quick though.

@DustinB3403 said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:

@anthonyh said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:

@DustinB3403 said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:

@anthonyh said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:

@FATeknollogee said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:

@anthonyh

Thx for the update.

Can you comment on the company, Quadric? How have they been to deal with ?

Curious if you've tried XO?

Quadric has been easy to work with. They are a small company, so you end up interfacing with the same people which can be nice. The only downside is they have strict support hours (since they are small), so after hours support is for emergencies only (I believe the put one engineer on call, so if it's a busy night you might have to wait a while). They are on the east coast of the US and I am on the west, so I sort-of "lose" a few hours of their support window (which I think is 8 - 5). I have bugged them a couple of times after hours and they did call me back...they weren't true emergencies (I needed our licensing reset).

I have not tried XO recently. I did look into it a while back, and it didn't fit our needs. I was looking for a backup solution that did global deduplication. We have 100 or so VMs, and Alike's pricing was pretty good.

Why not perform the deduplication inside of your Storage Repository?

How does that translate to backups?

You want to dedup your data, not the number of backups you keep right?

Dedup means to remove the duplicate records from a data set. So if you have 5 backups, and in each of those you have 20 copies that are identical, it'll only keep 1 copy, and have a pointer record to restore the original to that location.

Same concept applies. If your VM's don't change between backups, why keep multiple copies of it?

I only want to be backing up unique changed data, which is exactly what Alike does. If the same block of data exists between multiple VMs, it only backs up that block once and then builds references in a metadata database. So I'm able to back up 30 revisions of 40 TB of VMs with only 15 TB of space consumed on my backup datastore.

I don't think deduped backups and deduped SRs are the same. Just because you dedupe your SR (which, on our SAN, I am planning on doing) doesn't = deduped backups. At least in my environment...

@FATeknollogee said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:

@anthonyh
Is Quadric's support by tickets only or can you call them?

It's ticket drive, unfortunately. If you call, they basically put in a ticket for you. However, they are very responsive. If the problem is complex enough, you can usually get them to do a remote session with a phone conference. 99% of my interaction with their support group is tickets.

@DustinB3403 said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:

@anthonyh said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:

@FATeknollogee said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:

@anthonyh

Thx for the update.

Can you comment on the company, Quadric? How have they been to deal with ?

Curious if you've tried XO?

Quadric has been easy to work with. They are a small company, so you end up interfacing with the same people which can be nice. The only downside is they have strict support hours (since they are small), so after hours support is for emergencies only (I believe the put one engineer on call, so if it's a busy night you might have to wait a while). They are on the east coast of the US and I am on the west, so I sort-of "lose" a few hours of their support window (which I think is 8 - 5). I have bugged them a couple of times after hours and they did call me back...they weren't true emergencies (I needed our licensing reset).

I have not tried XO recently. I did look into it a while back, and it didn't fit our needs. I was looking for a backup solution that did global deduplication. We have 100 or so VMs, and Alike's pricing was pretty good.

Why not perform the deduplication inside of your Storage Repository?

How does that translate to backups?

@FATeknollogee said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:

@anthonyh

Thx for the update.

Can you comment on the company, Quadric? How have they been to deal with ?

Curious if you've tried XO?

Quadric has been easy to work with. They are a small company, so you end up interfacing with the same people which can be nice. The only downside is they have strict support hours (since they are small), so after hours support is for emergencies only (I believe the put one engineer on call, so if it's a busy night you might have to wait a while). They are on the east coast of the US and I am on the west, so I sort-of "lose" a few hours of their support window (which I think is 8 - 5). I have bugged them a couple of times after hours and they did call me back...they weren't true emergencies (I needed our licensing reset).

I have not tried XO recently. I did look into it a while back, and it didn't fit our needs. I was looking for a backup solution that did global deduplication. We have 100 or so VMs, and Alike's pricing was pretty good.

@FATeknollogee said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:

@anthonyh said in Backup solutions for Xenserver:

I am an Alike user and, although they have their own faults, the software has been doing a decent job backing up my environment....

I'm currently in the process of transitioning from Alike 3.5 to 4.2, which basically requires you to scrap and re-do your backups. Fortunately for me, I have the hardware to run both in parallel. I'm still working through the initial backups with 4.2, which are running into some snags (not unexpected), but their support has been responsive and helpful. I am hopeful things will iron out in sometime this week.

How was your transition from 3.5 to 4.2?

As of today, what can you say about working with software & the company itself?

I won't say it was perfect, but so far things have been relatively well. We have three large MS-SQL VMs that I've had trouble backing up (two of them backed up without much fuss under 3.5, one is new since our migration to 4.x), but it could be environmental. I've been pretty stubborn and have stuck to Enhanced Backups. Their support engineer wants me to try Q-Hybrid backups with these VMs...I just haven't had the time to juggle around my backup jobs (I have them structured in a way that makes it difficult to deviate from Enhance Backups). I'm backing up the databases themselves, so I'm not too worried about it.

I would say I have a 95% backup success rate. There are hiccups every now and then, but it's likely those are environmental. I have not had any issues restoring data when I've needed to, which is most important.

Yes yes, I know, Server 2003 was EOL-ed over a year ago...but it gets worse. So read on.

I have an ancient application that was set up on a Server 2003 box (which I've at least converted to a VM). However, it is joined to our old NT4 domain (told ya it gets worse). This application was poorly written and you need to log in as a user and leave the server component running (it does not run as a service).

That's fine and dandy, but the person who originally set this up did everything under the domain admin account!

I'd like to un-join this server from the NT4 domain and join it to our more modern Active Directory domain. Is there a way to preserve the domain admin profile? Basically, have the domain admin of the new domain inherit the profile of the old domain admin account?

Any advice would be much appreciated!

For what it's worth we are working on replacing the application...we have put it in the budget, it's just an unknown when the work will be done. I want to get the NT4 domain out of the mix because 1) well, it's older than shit, and 2) I can turn it off once this server is moved from it.

Used the local admin account to bind, and GAL address autocompletion works in Evolution and Thunderbird. So, thats good. Now to create that dummy account...

Yep, it's not working due to using external authentication. Looks like I may need to create a dummy account to authenticate to Zimbra's LDAP, which is not terrible (but not ideal).

https://bugzilla.zimbra.com/show_bug.cgi?id=50248

@StrongBad said in Long Shot - Evolution & Zimbra GAL:

Does Zimbra disable its own LDAP service when it uses Microsoft's instead?

It does not. Zimbra is heavily dependent on its LDAP setup. I don't know how the AD authentication piece works, but I do know accounts, distribution lists, aliases, etc, are all in its local LDAP database.

Back in the day at my previous job where we were using the GAL via external mail clients (Thunderbird, to be exact), no authentication was required to bind to Zimbra's LDAP. I forget which version changed that, if it was version 7 or version 8.

I see a bunch of active connections, but nothing over port 389.

If I do the following from my workstation, I get "ldap_bind: Invalid credentials (49)"

ldapwhoami -x -h mail.ourserver.org -D uid=myuser,ou=people,dc=ourserver,dc=org -W

or

ldapsearch -x -h mail.ourserver.org -D uid=myuser,ou=people,dc=ourserver,dc=org 'objectClass=*' -W

We do use external authentication (Active Directory). I wonder if that has something to do with it. The last time I set this up was, literally, over 5 years ago. Back then, I believe, Zimbra allowed unauthenticated binds. I suppose I could modify the LDAP config to allow that again?

Hmmm...

@scottalanmiller said in Long Shot - Evolution & Zimbra GAL:

@anthonyh said in Long Shot - Evolution & Zimbra GAL:

I just tried setting up LDAP address book in Thunderbird and cannot get it to work. So, I suspect it's something with Zimbra and not Evolution, but we'll see. Here is their official wiki article on specifically setting up the GAL in Thunderbird:

https://wiki.zimbra.com/wiki/Configure_Zimbra_GAL_as_LDAP_addressbook_in_Thunderbird

What kind of errors do you get?

@scottalanmiller said in Long Shot - Evolution & Zimbra GAL:

Are you sure that you have remote access to LDAP?

I've made sure that port 389 is open with firewalld on the Zimbra server. I don't believe there is anything else that would prevent communication since I'm on the same internal network as it (well, different subnet, but there shouldn't be anything in the way is what I mean).

I haven't done any hard core debugging, but it just doesn't seem to authenticate. When it prompts for me to enter my password, I enter my password and it asks again...and again...and again. I'm using the right password, I swear.

I just tried setting up LDAP address book in Thunderbird and cannot get it to work. So, I suspect it's something with Zimbra and not Evolution, but we'll see. Here is their official wiki article on specifically setting up the GAL in Thunderbird:

https://wiki.zimbra.com/wiki/Configure_Zimbra_GAL_as_LDAP_addressbook_in_Thunderbird

So far not very helpful...

https://forums.zimbra.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=60661

Alright, I posted to the Zimbra Forums. Once my post is approved by a moderator I'll link it here.

I think this may be a long shot, but worth a try!

Does anyone know how to add the Zimbra GAL as an LDAP address book in Evolution? The following article exists to show how to set this up for multiple mail clients (sadly excludes Evolution), and I cannot seem to adapt any of the examples to Evolution.

https://wiki.zimbra.com/wiki/Mail_Client_LDAP_Configuration

Any ideas? I'd love to get this working as a possible alternative to Outlook for our users.

Yeah. I guess I can just do this for now.

yum update --exclude=tzdata*

And I suppose it's safe to assume it'll be fixed soon.