Based on an article from the german magazine c't (c't kompakt Linux from november 2011, “Daten synchron ohne Google & Co”, pages 68 bis), Zarafa open source edition is a rather capable contender. The “free edition” includes an Outlook connector, which is not useful for the author's applications.

According to the same article, for small needs, a VM with 256MB RAM and 20GB disk is amply sufficient.

Considering the recent evolution of Ubuntu and the echos received in the community, this author deems it is not the right platform anymore. Therefore, Debian, as the classic base OS for many other distributions, was chosen instead.

Download a recent Debian NetInstall (BusinessCard) ISO file: http://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst.

Create a VM in VirtualBox Manager. The author chose 512MB RAM and 32GB disk. Boot using the Debian NetInstall ISO. In the installer, choose:

Now, the installer goes on installing the base system.

When the base system is installed (btw, virtualbox guest stuff got automatically installed), tasksel comes up asking what kind of components are to be installed. For now, select only “standard system utilities” and “SSH server”.

grub (bootloader) goes into the MBR (master boot record).

When all is done, unmount the ISO (from VirtualBox) and let the system restart.

If all went well, you'll end up on the login prompt, after a series of messages from the system.

After the basic installation, a little bit of security tuning is in order.

First, log in as root.

aptitude update
aptitude safe-upgrade

You'll want to configure a static IP address. Edit /etc/network/interfaces, locate the entry for your networking interface. It is by default configured for dhcp. Replace this by something like:

iface eth0 inet static
  address 192.168.1.8
  netmask 255.255.255.0
  gateway 192.168.1.1
  
iface eth0 inet6 static
  address 2001:7e8:220b::8
  netmask 64

To get this configuration up and running, issue the following commands:

ifdown eth0
ifup eth0

Now, ifconfig eth0 should show the IPv4 address along with several IPv6 addresses.

By default, Debian allows remote root login via SSH. This is less than optimal. Thus, edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config, change the setting for PermitRootLogin from yes to no. Restart the ssh daemon:

/etc/init.d/ssh restart

Note: you won't be able to remotely log in directly as root. Log in using your “normal” account. To work as root, become root via:

su -

You may want to install sudo and give sudo rights to your normal account (as is default in Ubuntu). In /etc/sudoers, you may define that users belonging to the admin group may do anything as root:

%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL

Of course, you'll have to add a group admin and add your normal account to that group:

groupadd admin
adduser youruser admin

Verify the result in /etc/group and try using sudo from “youruser”.

Also, to mitigate systematic attacks against your SSH server, install fail2ban:

aptitude install fail2ban

If fail2ban detects a number of unsuccessful logins from a certain origin, it will block that source from connecting again for a while.

A MySQL server with known root login is a pre-requirement for the installation of zarafa.

Install mysql-server (as of 2011-12-07, it's version 5.1.49) via:

aptitude install mysql-server

During installation, the root password will be set.

Also pre-required is an SMTP server, such as postfix. TODO: include postfix docs incl. antivirus/antispam and TLS from the Linux Server tutorial here.

change regarding install: the SPF filtering package is here (debian) called postfix-policyd-spf-python

change regarding install: following (un)archivers not found: lha, rar, unrar

change: clamav is already running, so restart instead of start

Another requirement is an apache server with PHP support. TODO: include apache docs from Linux Server tutorial here.

At http://community.zarafa.com/, you'll find a link for the latest final release (as of 2011-12-07, it's version 7.0.3-30515) - follow it. You'll get to a list of downloads, for different Linux distributions and distribution versions, always for the free or open source editions of Zarafa. In the author's case, it's the open source edition for Debian 6 x86_64 (a .tar.gz file of about 10MB to download).

The integrity of the file can be checked:

tar ztvf zcp-7.0.3-30515-debian-6.0-x86_64-opensource.tar.gz

which should show a list of .deb files.

Unpack the file using:

tar zxvf zcp-7.0.3-30515-debian-6.0-x86_64-opensource.tar.gz

In the subdirectory zcp-7.0.3-30515-debian-6.0-x86_64, you'll find the contents of the tar.gz:

• shell scripts for installing / uninstalling
• .deb files
  • libraries in certain versions as needed by zarafa (libical, libvmime)
  • interfaces for MAPI for PHP5, python
  • different components of zarafa (server, spooler, monitor, gateway, ical, indexer, dagent)