[SOLVED] Sleepy Dashboard and IMAP - approx 90 minutes !

[YITD]

We've been running zentyal successfully for just over 3 months now but hit a "show-stopper" yesterday.

On startup we manage to successfully login to the server but the dashboard dosn't come up leaving us with white browser page. Furthermore email services are not functional - we can't connect our imap clients to the server and Zarafa webmail is unavailable.

During this disfunctional period we noted the Zarafa service to be in a stopped state and managed to get it running through SSH using the command :
sudo /etc/init.d/zarafa-server start
At this point we manage to get to login to Zarafa via web browser and also manage to list all messages however outgoing emails remain in the outbox and no new emails come in.  IMAP clients remain un-connectable at this stage.

After about 90 minutes all begins to work normally. Dashboard presents the login screen and we managed to login and all functions including IMAP resume normally.

Following a restart the identical symptoms are reproduced. We repeated this exercise three times with identical results each time.

Any ideas on how to convince dashboard and IMAP to wake up on time?

[christian]

I doubt Zarafa restart is done directly using /etc/init.d/zarafa restart.
I don't use it but would not be surprised if this is rather something like /etc/init.d/zentyal groupware restart  or similar. What I mean to say is that Zentyal may use different config files...
This said, did you look at syslog and zentyal log already ?

[YITD]

Thanks Christian
Zarafa did actually start using that command - maybe something with our Zentyal 3.2 but I promise - it did
Yes - had a look at zentyal and syslogs but found nothing exciting in there that could hint toward the lazyness of dashboard and imap.

[christian]

OK, as I'm not using it, I won't push further regarding Zarafa start process. 
Coming back to what you call "laziness"    this is strange that you can't find anything.
What I don't understand reading your first post is whenever Zarafa would start if you don't launch it manually.
While services are not available, is there anything related to these services running ? (try "ps -efd" e.g.)

[YITD]

Interesting point - In our startup attempts so far we've always started Zarafa manually before the 90 min window is up so on our next attempt will try a restart 'without' manually starting zarafa to see if it too comes up after the 90 mins.

[astana]

Just a guess, but I'm thinking the 90 minutes is in fact the boot process. I've seen, and there are plenty of posts on the forum about the time taken to re-acl all the samba shares.
On our server this took around 20 minutes to boot up (3.0 at the time), and the later versions of Zentyal seem to boot faster, but in fact get to login quicker but haven't started all the services, so the web interface isn't really present.

It's easy to see, just run a shell or ssh in and look run top and you should see the boot process is still happening.

[YITD]

Thanks for your contribution Astana,
Your guess proved fruitfull.  We did actually find the smbd process running under root to be keeping the system busy for the 90 min period.  Killing this process did actually give us immediate access to dashboard and imap services (through Zarafa) within seconds !
So the question now becomes - Why is the smbd process taking so long to do its thing (whatever it is that its doing) at startup ?

[christian]

If you search this forum, you will find some topics about this behaviour and also a workaround (kind of).
This is linked to Samba checking (re-applying ?) ACL.

[YITD]

Thanks Christian,
We applied all updates which included one for smbd and it appeared to have resolved the issue.
Many thanks to all who contributed to this thread.
You people rock and make this product so great !