Zimbra Collaboration Server: Troubles after updating to ZCS 7.1.1 – here’s the solution.

Generally, Zimbra‘s update scripts for ZCS run smoothly. However, after updating ZCS from 7.0.1 to 7.1.1 on Ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS a couple of days ago, I noticed that most of the server’s services crashed within 1-2 hours after starting the (virtual) server.

To make a long debugging story short, here’s a summary of the problem:

The update script doesn’t properly remove old entries in /etc/rsyslog.conf when creating a new dedicated rsyslog configuration file for zimbra (/etc/rsyslog.d/60-zimbra.conf). This makes rsyslog log its own logging due to double rule entries – making /var/log/zimbra-stats.log grow at 2 MB/s. Like this, zimbra effectively DOSes itself as the server runs out of free disk space in no time (my above-average 12 GB of free space were filled within about 1 hour 40 minutes).

And here’s the solution:

1. Stop rsyslog to stop it from filling up your disk with nonsense: ‘/etc/init.d/rsyslog stop’ or ‘service rsyslog stop’
2. If necessary (i.e. if the updated server has been running for several minutes already), reclaim your free disk space by deleting/emptying big log files in /var/log, e.g. zimbra-stats.log, zimbra.log, mail.info, mail.log, mail.err, mail.warn etc.
3. Edit /etc/rsyslog.conf and remove the entries (likely at the end of the file) that look similar to these:
local0.* @mail.yourserver.com
local1.* @mail.yourserver.com
auth.* @mail.yourserver.com
local0.* -/var/log/zimbra.log
local1.* -/var/log/zimbra-stats.log
auth.* -/var/log/zimbra.log
mail.* @mail.yourserver.com
mail.* -/var/log/zimbra.log
(these are now in /etc/rsyslog.d/60-zimbra.conf)
4. Restart rsyslog: ‘service rsyslog restart’
5. Restart ZCS if it doesn’t run properly anymore: /etc/init.d/zimbra restart (you may even have to reboot the whole box if that doesn’t work)