Open-Xchange on FreeBSD HOWTO

This document was based on others' GNU/Linux specific documentation and contains the parts which are different or need to be changed for installing OX in a FreeBSD environment.

Specifically the following documents have been used in successfully completing the install on FreeBSD:

The INSTALL file of the OX Distribution (rather terse, but improving)

The Open-Xchange on Debian Sarge How-to by Laurent FRANCOISE (who thereby started all user contributed OX documentation you can find at the OX site)

You may also want to double check with the other documentation at the OX site, the OX FAQ, the OX Mailing Lists's archives, the OX Forum, the OX Wiki, the OX Bugzilla. I'm sure I forgot something.

System requirements
While I'll assume a working install of FreeBSD 5 there's nothing specific to this release in this document.

You'll need the following ports for OX (these will pull in quite a few others as well):

Miscellaneous
shells/bash

security/sudo

Java & Tomcat
Installing Java™ on FreeBSD is a bit complicated (some may say insanely complicated), mostly because of the way too restrictive license requirements by it's creator.

I built a native JDK 1.4.2 following two aricles: the FreeBSD Java™ Project pages are a bit terse for my taste, but you'll get there if you follow Java™ and Jakarta Tomcat on FreeBSD, eventually recompiling your kernel on the way. Also note that you'll need quite some time/patience and scratch space for building a native JDK.

Perl
devel/p5-Storable

devel/p5-Time-Local

net/p5-URI

net/p5-perl-ldap

www/p5-CGI.pm

converters/p5-MIME-Base64

converters/p5-Convert-ASN1

security/p5-Net-SSLeay

security/p5-Digest-MD5

security/p5-Authen-SASL

security/p5-IO-Socket-SSL

textproc/p5-XML-NamespaceSupport

textproc/p5-XML-SAX-Base

Ant
devel/apache-ant

Postgresql
databases/postgresql80-server or databases/postgresql74-server. Or just use any idle external Postgres server.

There is databases/postgresql-jdbc, but this is version 8.0 and still seems to have a few problems so I used pg74.215.jdbc3.jar from jdbc.postgresql.org which works fine with either Postgresql 7.4 or 8.0.

Apache
www/apache13[-modssl[+ipv6]]. Didn't try with Apache2, but should work

www/mod_jk since www/mod_jk2 is officially unsupported as of Nov 2004

LDAP
Use an external LDAP server. Or use the port in net/openldap22-[sasl-]server with the following changes:

You need to compile WITH_ACI because OX seems to make use of this feature, even though the OpenLDAPaci “syntax is vendor-specific>” and the OX site explicitly says OX should work with any LDAP server. Hm...

Change all ACLs in slapd.conf that contain regular expressions from dn to dn.regex since the default dnstyle changed from version 2.1 to 2.2 from regex to exact -- SLOX (from which OX stems) shipped with OpenLDAP 2.1. See the respective OpenLDAP Faq-O-Matic entry for more info.

Also the new peername.ip style in ACLs is much easier to read and maintain. OX still uses version 2.1 notation like 'by peername="ip=127/.0/.0/.1" read' -- compare this to the much cleaner 'by peername.ip="127.0.0.1" read'.

Finally: If you're all confused about ACLs read the Administrator's Guide and the FAQ entry on ACLs. Or dive right into man slapd.conf.

Install
Now install and configure everything according to the INSTALL file or check with Laurent's or Sietse's HOWTO. Below you'll find the parts that need to be changed for OX to compile and run on FreeBSD:

Changes for FreeBSD
Note that this might not be a complete list, just apply a bit common sense and things will go smoothly. I'll refer to the sections as used by Laurent:

Section “Pre-Install / Java stuff”
The Java Servlet Development Kit 2.0 (jsdk.jar) is not needed. For Tomcat 5 use common/lib/servlet-api.jar, for Tomcat 4 it's servlet.jar.

Section “Installation”
When actually installing OX first do a ./configure --help to see what's available. E.g. --with-dbhost=DBHOST for an external Postgres server, --with-runuid=www and --with-rungid=www since apache runs as user www on FreeBSD.

Section “Post-Installation”
“Login.pl”
www/apache13's cgi-bin is in /usr/local/www/cgi-bin/ but you could use something else and tell Apache about it in /usr/local/etc/apache/httpd.conf.

“Servlets”
My web.xml file looks like the one in the INSTALL file.

“mod_jk”
Put something like this in /usr/local/etc/apache/mod_jk.conf and add Include /usr/local/etc/apache/mod_jk.conf to /usr/local/etc/apache/httpd.conf (Just copy /usr/local/etc/apache/mod_jk.conf.sample to mod_jk.conf and change the hostname):

# Replace HOST with the hostname of your JSP server, as
# specified in workers.properties.
<IfModule mod_jk.c>
    JkWorkersFile /usr/local/etc/apache/workers.properties
    JkLogFile  logs/jk.log
    JkLogLevel warn

    # Sample JkMounts.  Replace these with the paths you would
    # like to mount from your JSP server.
    JkMount /servlet/* HOST
    JkMount /servlet/webdav.contacts* HOST
</IfModule>

Then add something like this to /usr/local/etc/apache/workers.properties (I copied /usr/local/etc/apache/workers.properties.sample to workers.properties, changed the hostname and added the last two lines):

# Change HOST to the hostname of your JSP server.
#
worker.list=HOST

worker.HOST.port=8009
worker.HOST.host=HOST
worker.HOST.type=ajp13
worker.HOST.lbfactor=1

workers.tomcat_home=/usr/local/tomcat
workers.java_home=/usr/local/java

“Postgresql”
The postgres user is called pgsql, so su - pgsql when doing any Postgres work (like adding users or databases with createuser -A -D -P -E ox or createdb -E unicode -O ox ox).

“Create a user”
Before you can create a user for OX you have to change a few scripts in $OX_INSTALL/sbin (where $OX_INSTALL defaults to /usr/local/open-xchange if you didn't supply some --prefix to ./configure).

Most files in $OX_INSTALL/sbin have #!/bin/bash as their command interpreter but FreeBSD's bash is in /usr/local/bin/bash. You can either change all these scripts or simply create a symbolic link from /usr/local/bin/bash to /bin/bash.

“Website files”
www/apache13's DocumentRoot is in /usr/local/www/data/ but you could provide your own and tell Apache about it. Create cfintranet/webmail with mkdir -p there.

“The Filespool”
sbin/correctfilespool has #!/bin/sh as it's command interpreter, but rather expects this so be some kind of bash, not plain Bourne shell. So change this to #!/usr/local/bin/bash.

Also sbin/correctfilespool uses GNU seq to count from 0 to 255, so either install the GNU sysutils/coreutils and replace all orrurances of seq with gseq or simply replace the whole seq 0 255 with jot 256 0, which does the same and comes with FreeBSD.

“Go!”
Before starting OX you'll have to edit $OX_INSTALL/etc/init.d/sessiond, etc/init.d/groupware and etc/init.d/webmail because FreeBSD's ps expects keywords in a different syntax than GNU/Linux's ps. Replace all ps xao "%p %a" with ps xao "pid args".

Famous last words
“Thanks for all the fish” go to FreeBSD kernel hacker le (who's to blame for my dabbling with FreeBSD) and rm (without whom I never would have to deal with SLOX/OX/NOX at all).