1 Topic by maxB

  • maxB
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  • Registered: 2011-10-03
  • Posts: 16

Topic: Concerns regarding Debian and Policy/Cluebringer upgrade

==== Required information ====
- iRedMail version:
- Store mail accounts in which backend (LDAP/MySQL/PGSQL):
- Linux/BSD distribution name and version:
- Related log if you're reporting an issue:
======== Required information ====
- iRedMail version: 0.8.3
- Store mail accounts in which backend (LDAP/MySQL/PGSQL): MySQL
- Linux/BSD distribution name and version: Debian Squeezy (6.0.6)
- Related log if you're reporting an issue: n/a
====

Hi there,

I'm currently planning to proceed with the latest upgrades of iRedMail and iRedAdmin-Pro-MySQL - as I am going through all the necessary steps for preparation, I stumbled across the whole Policyd-Cluebringer-thing. As I started off with iRedMail 0.7.3 I obviously use the 'old' Policyd package (in my case it's version 1.82 within the Debian Squeeze system packages).

My question is: What's the best way to start off with the necessary updates? Right now I would have upgraded to Debian Wheezy to fit the requirements of the later to be executed upgrade to iRedMail 0.8.6 (as Debian Sqeeze support was dropped). But I've read about some dependency problems with Debian Wheezy and Policyd in this forum (http://www.iredmail.org/forum/topic5876 … heezy.html).

As I want a minimized downtime for all of the components (including greylisting etc.) I would like to avoid taking the Policyd service down.

Should I simply go on with upgrading Debian, then upgrading iRedMail (including iRedAPD, Roundcube etc.), then continue with iRedAdmin-Pro-MySQL and afterwards install Cluebringer within the Wheezy environment by hand?

Are there any suggestions out there?

Kind regards
maxB

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2 Reply by ZhangHuangbin

  • ZhangHuangbin
  • ZhangHuangbin
  • iRedMail Developers
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  • Registered: 2009-05-06
  • Posts: 31,091

Re: Concerns regarding Debian and Policy/Cluebringer upgrade

Sorry about the confusion, please allow me to explain:

maxB wrote:

Debian Sqeeze support was dropped

We still provide technical support for Debian Squeeze which is running iRedMail, the key is you cannot install the latest iRedMail on it.

Since Debian 7 (Wheezy) doesn't provide Policyd anymore, it's a little hard to upgrade Policyd to Cluebringer.
Below is my suggestion, but please do not do it immediately, we still miss some tutorial and/or migration tools.

My suggestion is: Upgrading iRedMail without upgrading Debian from Squeeze to Wheezy. That means, upgrade iRedMail by following our upgrade tutorials (e.g. iRedAPD, iRedAdmin/iRedAdmin-Pro, Roundcube, etc); stick to Policyd-1.8. And, please do not upgrade your server OS to Debian 7 (Wheezy).

After upgrading, you have a Debian Squeeze running iRedMail-0.8.6. Now let's upgrade Policyd to Cluebringer.

How to upgrade Debian from Squeeze to Wheezy:

1) Be careful with Dovecot. Debian 6 ships Dovecot-1.2.x, but Wheezy ships Dovecot-2.x. They have many different parameters in dovecot.conf, so you cannot simply upgrade Dovecot package. Please refer to this tutorial to get a working config file for Dovecot-2.x: http://www.iredmail.org/forum/topic4493 … tos-5.html

2) Let's upgrade Policyd now.
2.1) Disable Policyd in Postfix first, you can simply remove 'check_policy_service inet:127.0.0.1:10031' in /etc/postfix/main.cf, then restart Postfix service.

It's now safe to upgrade Debian 6 to 7 (of course you already have a working config file for Dovecot-2.x). NOTE: You don't have greylisting/whitelist/blacklist/throttling enabled right now since you disabled Policyd in Postfix.

2.2) Install Cluebringer manually and import Policyd data. There're some steps you should do, please follow our wiki tutorial below:
http://www.iredmail.org/wiki/index.php? … luebringer

NOTES:

*) Tutorial for Debian is not yet finished, but you can check tutorial for RHEL/CentOS to see how it goes.
*) Cluebringer doesn't support throttling by email size of outgoing email, so if you have this kind of throttling in Policyd, you will lose it with Cluebringer.

2.3) Enable Cluebringer in Postfix.

That's the summary.

Addition explanation about Policyd -> Cluebringer upgrade/migration, it's quoted from an email i sent to another iRedMail user:

*) Old iRedMail releases supports only Policyd-1.8. But some Linux/BSD venders
provides Cluebringer and deprecated Policyd-1.8, so we have to use Cluebringer
instead of Policyd on these distributions. For example, Debian 7, Ubuntu 12.04
and later releases, FreeBSD.

At that time, iRedAdmin-Pro supported only Policyd, not Cluebringer.

*) Since iRedMail-0.8.6, almost all Linux/BSD distributions provides Cluebringer
and deprecated Policyd (not available in official package repositories), so we
switch to Cluebringer on ALL distributions. and iRedAdmin-Pro supports
both Policyd and Cluebringer.

*) Cluebringer is a completely rewritten program by Policyd developer(s),
it provides (almost) the same features as Policyd, but they use different SQL
tables. Cluebringer is more flexible than Policyd (or you can say, complex),
it works different way than Policyd internally. Even Policyd/Cluebringer developer
cannot provide an official upgrade tutorial (if you found one, please do let me know).

*) The good news is, we pre-defined some policies in Cluebringer to achieve
blacklist/whitelist/greylisting/throttling related features. Since we all iRedMail users have
the same policies in Cluebringer, it should be very easy to upgrade from Policyd.
I'm working on this, upgrade tutorial is about 50% done, we still need a tutorial or
shell/python script to migrate Policyd database.