Installing kolab, part 4

After I upgraded from Kolab 3.0 to 3.1, hoping it would solve the SMTP issue (i.e. I could not send email from the roundcube app freshly setup by the kolab script! Same problem with msmtp…), I ended up with another broken kolab instance: Roundcube wouldn’t connect to the database any more. When I was trying to restart kolab’s service, all I got was:

root@totosh:/home/hrd# service kolab-saslauthd start
root@totosh:/home/hrd# Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/saslauthd/__init__.py", line 114, in run
    self.do_saslauthd()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/saslauthd/__init__.py", line 195, in do_saslauthd
    auth.connect()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pykolab/auth/__init__.py", line 148, in connect
    from pykolab.auth import ldap
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pykolab/auth/ldap/__init__.py", line 38, in <module>
   import auth_cache
ImportError: No module named auth_cache

Quite fed up, I tried to re-install the thing again. Yes, I’m trying really hard to make this work.

So this time, I followed the not-yet-official docs which are up-to-date to deal with kolab 3.1, the latest release version.

During the setup, I got this:

Please supply a Kolab Service account password. This account is used by various
services such as Postfix, and Roundcube, as anonymous binds to the LDAP server
will not be allowed.

Kolab Service password [xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]: 
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/sbin/setup-kolab", line 42, in <module>
    setup.run()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pykolab/setup/__init__.py", line 43, in run
    components.execute('_'.join(to_execute))
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pykolab/setup/components.py", line 170, in execute
    execute(component)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pykolab/setup/components.py", line 202, in execute
    components[component_name]['function'](conf.cli_args, kw)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pykolab/setup/setup_ldap.py", line 483, in execute
    auth.connect()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pykolab/auth/__init__.py", line 148, in connect
    from pykolab.auth import ldap
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pykolab/auth/ldap/__init__.py", line 38, in <module>
    import auth_cache
ImportError: No module named auth_cache

Yet again, on a completely fresh Debian wheezy, Kolab’s setup failed.

The conclusion, that others have got to on the IRC channel (hello bertie if you read this!) is that Kolab was not working on Debian at that point.

So I’m now trying CentOS, which I never used… I’m not too happy to have to try to get used to a whole new system just to run Kolab. But I guess it can’t hurt to learn a little bit about CentOS and since the machine’s only purpose is actually to run Kolab, it seems like the best choice.

Fortunately now, some people are contributing to fix the Debian packages of Kolab. I’ll try again in the future!