Zentyal 3.3 - A Magnificent Fail

[FastLaneJB]

I'd just like to add my thoughts on this. I had a perfectly working 3.2 but since upgrading to 3.3 my PHP is broken. Many people have mentioned this as Zarafa Webma no longer working but in my case I've got websites on my server and they are all offline now.

It's understandable that the odd bug here or there gets through but Zentyal seems to push forward so fast with new features that there's little polish, testing on existing features. I'd like to see no need modules for a while until the existing ones are all fixed and working properly. Also add in a few of the feature requests out there. Like for example hidden shares on Samba was requested ages ago, it's probably only a few lines of code to implement it.

Openchange for instance is a great idea but it's still in it's early stages. I mean from what I've read it works properly in the most part with Outlook 2003. That's an out of date, out of support product that's 10 years old. It needs to work properly with modern versions of Outlook to be of proper use. Just because businesses want to save money on their server doesn't mean they are running Windows XP with Office 2003 still on their clients.

So overall I think you've got all the modules you need for the minute. Fix up the system so it's reliable and stable. Then add to those modules and flesh them out as some are very basic. Finally then go forth and add some new modules. I think people will understand if the pace of change slows a bit. However I think the programmers like writing the new modules so once a module is written it seems like they get bored and move on.

Not sure what I'm going to do about my server exactly but I cannot trust my home server to  Zentyal currently it seems let alone a business server. This is not a good way to sell the product.

[christian]

I had a perfectly working 3.2 but since upgrading to 3.3 my PHP is broken.

The real question here is, at least from my standpoint: "why did you then upgrade from 3.2 to 3.3 if 3.2 was stable and running fine?"

If goal is/was to benefit from OpenChange, then, don't be surprised if it doesn't work 100%. As you wrote, OpenChange is still in its early stages. Target is rather, if I understand well, to have fixed most of the bugs when next Enterprise Edition will be published, each community edition in the middle being pushed so that community users can test, comment and help with bug discovery. That's fair once understood.

Samba brings its own part of changes too, 4.0 being quite new plus Zentyal wants to introduce some design changes like Apache replacement for Zentyal GUI (which is a good idea already suggested long long time ago).
Stacked all together, this can hardly be rock stable and goal being to produce one community edition every quarter, polishing will be achieved, I suppose, with the next community editions, assuming there is not too many new stuff in the middle.

This said, I'm obviously on you side when you ask for less but more stable features 

[FastLaneJB]

The real question here is, at least from my standpoint: "why did you then upgrade from 3.2 to 3.3 if 3.2 was stable and running fine?"

Well I guess I missed the in the release notes where it said it was a beta product and shouldn't be installed on stable / production systems... I'd thought they'd done a testing period for a few months to try and polish it up and after all it only added OpenChange as a new module so I didn't think it would have regressed so much. If MS release a new version of Windows, Exchange or whatever it might have a few rough edges here and there but they'll fix them quickly but regardless it works and can be used in production from the minute they release it.

I upgraded in the hope of more bug fixes as 3.2 is hardly perfect either though it had just about got to the point where each feature was working properly. I'm only talking about the PHP issue but I had to do some other fixes to get other parts of the system running again. However I'm at a loss with PHP as it appears it needs to be recompiled and new modules pushed out for it.

I'm considering just a plain Ubuntu system with Webmin to give a bit of a graphical front end to it. I think it should be a more stable system overall and considering I need hooks to get around some parts of Zentyal it could actually be less work overall.

[J. A. Calvo]

"if there is no strong improvement in the upgrade process"

Haven't we improved that already? The upgrade from 3.2 to 3.3 should be very smooth, if you find any issue please report it and will be fixed as soon as possible. I acknowledge that in previous versions (from 2.2 to 3.0 for example), the ugprade was almost impossible. But that has changed already...

[Doward]

Just want to say that I upgraded from 3.2-->3.3 smoothly.  Uptime has been 10 days with no issues so far.  Haven't had to restart samba4 once in that timeframe

[FastLaneJB]

"if there is no strong improvement in the upgrade process"

Haven't we improved that already? The upgrade from 3.2 to 3.3 should be very smooth, if you find any issue please report it and will be fixed as soon as possible. I acknowledge that in previous versions (from 2.2 to 3.0 for example), the ugprade was almost impossible. But that has changed already...

Well yes it's not impossible but it doesn't seem to result in a working system at the end either. The PHP is broken and hence Zarafa and Apache webserver don't work. Is this going to get fixed anytime soon?

[J. A. Calvo]

Well yes it's not impossible but it doesn't seem to result in a working system at the end either. The PHP is broken and hence Zarafa and Apache webserver don't work. Is this going to get fixed anytime soon?

Please file a bug at http://trac.zentyal.org/newticket with the details of the problem and we'll do our best to fix it. Thanks!

[Laurent Dinclaux]

Please file a bug at http://trac.zentyal.org/newticket with the details of the problem and we'll do our best to fix it. Thanks!

This is totally useless. I have been left with a broken samba upgrading to 3.2, then 3.3. I tried posting in the forums, nothing, I tried posting a bug report, got ignored, and still is.

You, Zentyal team, are underestimating the community regarding commercial opportunities: we could be your best advocates. I have two customers that I would like to move to Zentyal, and buy a subscription for them. But regarding your bad support and all critical issues that come for each releases, I am totally scared to do so.

[stm999999999]

Please file a bug at http://trac.zentyal.org/newticket with the details of the problem and we'll do our best to fix it. Thanks!

This is totally useless.

There are so many new and unassigned tickets :-( I have several myself there ... :-(