Fixing Cron Jobs in Zimbra 8 on CentOS 6.3

In a previous post, I detailed some preliminary steps for installing Zimbra 8 GA on CentOS 6.3.  Today, I realized that my server status was not accurately reporting the status of various Zimbra services and server metrics.  A little digging around showed me that none of the Zimbra 8 cron jobs were running or properly scheduled.  Here is how I solved my problem:

First, install cronie:

# yum install cronie

This will provide us with a familiar crontab interface, and it will make it much easier to add the Zimbra 8 cron jobs to our system.  Next, we must remove exim so that we don't have another sendmail on our system to pollute our running process name space:

# rpm -e --nodeps exim

Leaving exim installed will conflict with Zimbra's MTA.  If the MTA fails to start, you might encounter the following errors:

[zimbra@zimbra ~]$ zmmtactl start
Rewriting configuration files...done.
postfix/postfix-script: warning: not owned by root: /opt/zimbra/postfix-2.10-20120422.2z/conf/main.cf
postfix/postfix-script: warning: not owned by root: /opt/zimbra/postfix-2.10-20120422.2z/conf/master.cf
postfix/postfix-script: warning: not owned by root: /opt/zimbra/postfix-2.10-20120422.2z/conf/master.cf.in
postfix/postfix-script: warning: not owned by root: /opt/zimbra/postfix-2.10-20120422.2z/conf/tag_as_foreign.re
postfix/postfix-script: warning: not owned by root: /opt/zimbra/postfix-2.10-20120422.2z/conf/tag_as_originating.re
 

Run the following commands as root:

# /opt/zimbra/libexec/zmfixperms --verbose --extended
# su - zimbra 
# zmmtactl restart

Next, navigate to the Zimbra 8 crontabs directory:

[root@zimbra crontabs]# pwd

/opt/zimbra/zimbramon/crontabs

From here, we have to concatenate all of our cron files into one easy to digest crontab:

[root@zimbra crontabs]# cat crontab >> crontab.zimbra

[root@zimbra crontabs]# cat crontab.ldap >> crontab.zimbra

[root@zimbra crontabs]# cat crontab.logger >> crontab.zimbra

[root@zimbra crontabs]# cat crontab.mta >> crontab.zimbra

[root@zimbra crontabs]# cat crontab.store >> crontab.zimbra

Finally, we use crontab to load the new crontab.zimbra file:

[root@zimbra crontabs]# crontab crontab.zimbra

A quick 'crontab -l' will show our current crontab, and after a few minutes, Zimbra 8 on CentOS 6.3 should be properly reporting server statistics, performing regular house keeping, and more.  There may be a better way to go about this, but I haven't found one as of yet.  Before putting this into production, please test thoroughly.  If I encounter any other issues, I will either update this post or create an entirely new post (depending on the scope of the problem).