Installing and Configuring RoundCube?

[Tom]

Being a rainy day, I finally dove in to install RoundCube (http://roundcube.net/) to play with and see if it's as nice as many say it is.

And I'm not all the way there and hope someone can help. I'd been told the instructions aren't easy to follow and boy, is that ever true.

First I created the database instance in CNC's MySQL account manager, and called it "roundmail"

Next I uploaded the files to a folder on the server (/wm/ for purpose of discussion), and then I used telnet (from CNC) and changed directories to the folder where the database config files are. When I log in, I figured out that I wasn't at the root like I thought I was and had to enter "cd .." to jump up before entering the cd command to get to the /SQL/ folder. For those who follow, this example is using a folder titled "wm" where the entire RoundCube install went.

Setting up the database was a problem until I got help. So if you are within the /big/dom/xmydomain/www/wm/SQL/ folder in telnet, you issue this command:

mysql -u xmydomain-p -h MySQL.mydomain.com xmydomain-roundmail <./mysql.initial.sql

And that got the database set up... I think. At least I finally didn't get any errors.

But now I'm stymied on the configuration file and hope someone can help me get them right.

When I use a browser and go to mydomain.com/wm, I get this error:

DATABASE ERROR: CONNECTION FAILED!

Unable to connect to the database!
Please contact your server-administrator.
:mad:

There also is an /installer/ folder but the instructions don't tell you to go there. But if I navigate to mydomain.com/wm/installer, it runs a test and tells me I have one fatal error in the PHP area:

Sockets: NOT OK (See http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.sockets.php)


So can someone give me a hand here on the config files in futurequest-land?

[Melissa]

Just to give a little bit of help (from a behind the desk perspective), I can confirm that you did populate the database, Tom. If you look in your CNC MySQL Manager, you will see that it shows disk usage by the database (an empty database will show 0 KB for disk space usage).

I'm guessing that the script is probably trying to connect using localhost. That won't work on FutureQuest as the MySQL servers are separate from the web servers. The MySQL Manager in the CNC will show the hostname addresses you will need to use for MySQL.

[Terra]

PHP sockets are not compiled in due to security and resource issues... Our TOS states that processes creating listening sockets are not allowed...

http://www.futurequest.net/Services/TOS/#Daemons

[Tom]

I saw the same thing, Melissa and thanks again for your help. I'm still missing something in the CFG file and hope that someone who's gotten it to work comes along.

Terra, I'm not certain that the socket is required, since that area is nowhere to be found in the install instructions.

[Melissa]

Hi Tom,

Your error logs are showing:
[15-Mar-2008 21:41:09 -0400] DB Error: no RDBMS driver specified in /big/dom/xmydomain/www/wm/program/include/rcube_mdb2.inc on line 106

Looking up that error message at
http://roundcubeforum.net/forum/index.php?topic=2752.0
I found a post that possibly may lead you to a solution.

I would first try making the change to 'db' as suggested and see if that works.

By the way, RoundCube says its latest stable version does work on PHP4, according to this (http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=793458). But, if you should decide you want to be upgraded to PHP5, we can do so upon request. Just send the request to the Service Desk (http://service.futurequest.net/index.php?_a=tickets&_m=submit) and we'll work with you to get that done.

Hope this helps further. If anyone else has installed this successfully on FutureQuest and has some insight, I'm sure Tom would appreciate it. You may also wish to try posting at the RoundCube forums, Tom, in case others there can help.

Let us know how it goes. :smile:

[Tom]

Thanks again! I didn't think to look at the error logs :ytthink: That led to a line in the db_inc file:
$rcmail_config['db_backend'] = 'mdb2';
...and changing that to 'db' fixed that problem and I now get the login screen. Progress!

Now I'm on to working out the login which should be simply the mail username and password which should be simple... but now that's failing with an invalid password:

[16-Mar-2008 07:43:21 -0400] IMAP Error: Invalid password
in on line 0

Note that it's "in" no file, meaning the IMAP server is balking. I first thought it was something to do with the xmydoman-username, but trying every combination, that doesn't appear to be it. More digging into the config files...

[Tom]

Allright, now I'm in and it works partly.

I saw a post where you take the index.php file and look for:

else if ($_SESSION['temp'] && !empty($_POST['_user']) && isset($_POST['_pass']) &&
rcmail_login(get_input_value('_user', RCUBE_INPUT_POST),
get_input_value('_pass', RCUBE_INPUT_POST, true, 'ISO-8859-1'), $host))
{

if I remove the ISO-8859-1 part, leaving the '' then I can log in.

But now that I'm in, the message titles and contents are blank--it doesn't show anything except that there is mail there. Reading the message board, I see I'm not alone. And entering 'utf-8' didn't fix that...

It's also kludgy because it thinks my e-mail address is xmydoman-me@mydomain.com. More fun figuring that one out...

[Tom]

More progress. This post (http://roundcubeforum.net/forum/index.php?topic=1448.0) showed me how and where to append the xmydomain- in front of my login, making that part simpler--I just enter my e-mail userid and it works. (Note this affects only us on the older FQ mail systems that have to use "xmydomain-username" as the mail login. Newer clients don't have to do that)

Still haven't sorted out the charset issue in the previous message...

(I'm posting all of this here in case someone else comes along and wants to install this alternative webmail solution one day.)

[Jeff]

(I'm posting all of this here in case someone else comes along and wants to install this alternative webmail solution one day.)
Much appreciated -- I've been eying roundcube for some time now. Squirrelmail is ok, but feels really old when you use it side by side with gmail now for example.

[Tom]

Melissa/Terra, if you're still listening, I found a clue and I think the fix is at the Apache level which is out of my area of influence (?). I saw this message posted recently and the guy's issues mirror my own:

I've been struggling with some charset issues, I first had to modify the index.php page to get logins to work, and then all emails were showing up as (no subject), and emails would appear as completely blank.

After a fair bit of debugging, I noticed that my libiconv libraries dated back to 2001. I downloaded, compiled, and installed the current libiconv-1.12 and magically all was well.

So. If you're experience strange issues like this, it might not be a problem with Roundcube or PHP at all - you might simply have out-of-date libraries.

[Matt]

Impressed with Roundcube's demo, I tried to install it myself on FQ. Trying to squash all the bugs/ compatibility issues turned out to be a big headache. I would love to hear the details if you manage to get it working, but I think it's going to require rewriting some areas of the script.

-Matt