Hi guys, I am attempting to upgrade our James 2.3.1 version of the server to the just released 3.0Beta 5 since we are anxious to provide an IMAP server. And I have to admit that I am having all kinds of troubles figuring out how to do so. Much of the documentation seems to be very incomplete, poorly written, and has lots of grammatical errors making comprehension even more challenging. That said, I have made progress and even have managed to get the new server up and running, albeit without enabling any of the IMAP, SMTP or POP3 services yet. I will report where I am at, troubles I have encountered, and what I have done to workaround things or am just plain stumped. If this is not the right forum for me to report/ask questions about installing 3.0 please redirect me to the right place.

1. The first major problem I have encountered is that according to the instructions at https://james.apache.org/server/3/config-system.html it talks about the spring-server.xml file and states

"In James distribution, the spring files are located under conf/context folder and splitted into a main file (james-server-context.xml) which imports 4 other files (1 per mailbox type): james-mailbox-jcr-context.xml, james-mailbox-jpa-context.xml, james-mailbox-maildir-context.xml, james-mailbox-memory-context.xml."

I cannot locate any of these files and it appears that they were not included in the zip file that I downloaded. It appears, from other docs that I may need to configure these in regards to my database setup, but for now I am just punting on this and assuming that there is a default configuration in the jar files somewhere else.


2. This second issue is mostly a heads up/FYI but it cost me a lot of time trying to figure out what the problems were and track down so this ought to get fixed. On the website at https://james.apache.org/server/3/config.html it states -

"We ship with default configuration (embedded in jars) and -template files you can use to override the default configuration. Simply copy in conf folder *-template.xml to *.xml (example: smtpserver-template.xml to smtpserver.xml), and change in *.xml the settings to map your needs."

I do not believe this is true. There are a number of these template configuration files for which I HAD to remove the "-template" portion of the name in order for me to get the server up and running. So I am going to presume that for at least the following set of these config files there is NOT a default. (Incidentally, it is very difficult to grok the exception messages and stack walk backs to understand what was going wrong and I am not certain that I have captured all of these in my report here...)

indexer-template.xml
quota-template.xml
events-template.xml
managesieveserver-template.xml


3. Another heads up/FYI. On the website at https://james.apache.org/server/3/config-mailrepositorystore.html it states -

"If the administrator wants to configure a database other than MySQL, it will be necessary to add the jar or zip file containing the JDBC driver classes to the lib subdirectory of the installation directory."

Again I am going to say this is not true. (Maybe for Derby?) I am going to want to use MySQL as I have it tied in with my Apache Tomcat server to better manage mail users and list members via a servlet. I had a devil of a time figuring out that I needed the mysql-connector-java-5.1.28-bin.jar and where to find it. But without it, trying to get the server up and running failed. It would be very helpful to mention where one can get connectors for the different kinds of databases commonly used/supported, IMHO.


4. Now I am stuck on this last issue, trying to grok the instructions at http://james.apache.org/server/3/upgrade-2.3.html First of all someone needs to re-write this page, the English and grammar is pretty bad and confusing. My first issue is that in 2.3.1 I used the MySQL database to store user information. There is no description of what I need to do to migrate said information into 3.0. The example and file shows how to do this if one were using files to store user information, but not for a database.

I am confused however, do I even need to do this? My experimentation seems to imply that I do, since I cannot get the CLI or JMX console to correctly respond to a listusers command, but why? Did the database schema change for 3.0? And if I do manage to get this migration step to work, will I ruin the database and make it unusable for James 2.3.1 to use it, should I need to drop back to it?

Also, it is not totally clear what I need to do about the actual mail store. Do I just copy the user directories over into the 3.0 server space? From what I am reading it does not sound like it will be that simple... So I need the details of what to do here...

One last thought, I have never used a JMX console before, it might be helpful to supply a little more details/examples for us newbies to that tool...


Thanks in advance for any and all offers to help me along, and I hope this feedback will be useful as the team moves towards the 3.0 release.

     Marc...



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