Citadel Groupware

Lets keep the discussion about citadel in this topic. If you think you need to comment on or pose your concern about webtop, do so in the split-off topic Concerns about webtop

I tried to install Webtop on my test Nethserver machine however I am not able to make it work.
It is installed properly but cannot access it.

I need that in order to compare with the installed Citadel instance I have.

Error
The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.

Please ignore my earlier post, the problem was due to the fact that I was running Spreed webrtc on the same tomcat port 8080… my apologies for the false alert.

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I was working on a comparison list however realized that we cannot compare the 2 products.
The Webtop4 is mainly an email server with extra features that comes along such as calendar sharing, public folders sharing and enterprise document access (this feature in specific is best handled with the Nextcloud)

As for the Citadel , similar to Webtop in addition to Notes, wiki and blog, stronger Group calendaring and scheduling (WebDAV, GroupDAV, and Kolab-1 compatible) , Built-in RSS Feed Aggregation, Support for push e-mail and mobile devices, Built-in full text index for fast searching , Multiple domain support (does not exist in Webtop), built-in integration with perimiter email filtering technologies such as Realtime Blackhole Lists (RBL’s), SpamAssassin, and ClamAV antivirus,
Important feature in Citadel : Server-to-server replication. Users in any number of domains can be spread out across any number of Citadel servers, allowing you to put data where you need it, and enabling infinite horizontal scalability.
Built-in instant messenger service I wouldn’t rate that high but still a nice feature
It provides its own implementations of these server protocols: IMAP, POP3, SMTP, ManageSieve, XMPP, Citadel.
It is 100% free open source GPL3, its codebase is written mostly in C. Where the Webtop is JAVA

With no offense to anyone I do not see Webtop as a competitor to Citadel. I would say that some people have the choice to make them work together with Citadel as the front end.

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Thanks for your plee for citadel. I do think citadel has some powerful features.
We could take a next step and installing Citadel on a NethServer (7).
It would be awesome if you would try this and make an install howto.
The step after that would be creating a NethServer module for Citadel.

I am looking forward to your findings installing Citadel on a NethServer.

Thank you Rob,
I was experimenting the Spreed.me feature under Nextcloud. It works very well however Nethserver needs to do some preconfiguration to the Tomcat server port 8080 is conflicting with many services.
I guess the same problem I faced with Spreed.me would be faced with Citadel.

Since my Tomcat is disabled now, I will try to install citadel and see if it works then write a how to if I was successful.

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I have tried Citadel before. When I say before, its like 2008-2009. Its a good email server, it was based off BSD but can be installed in Ubuntu when I tried it. I has an easy installation script and. It was then boasted to have a set and forget and was said to scale. However, the GUI is a lot to be desired, its pretty basic and the groups or meeting was called rooms.

If we are to consider, may I also request Zimbra (this has been requested before but I think due to how accounts are handled, it was not possible) in the comparison chart.

Tried to install citadel on ns7 :slight_smile:

Got access to login-page and could login with admin.

Authentication: build in, not ldap or AD!

Will play a bit with it and report.

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as said before, zimbra can’t be installed on NS (like zarafa, for example) because it wants its own daemons…

about citadel, if it can’t be integrated with ldap (were it be openldap or AD) it’s quite useless

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If no LDAP then I join my voice to Stefano, no point in integrating it.

During installation you can choose authentication. Choices are internal, ldap or AD.
Only because it’s the fastest way. :innocent:

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then all you need is a nethserver-citadel package to configure auth…

I’m curious, does it play with the NS mail-server or (as zarafa) does it deploy it own imap server?

Below are the steps to install Citadel on Nethserver7b2

First this is the list of services that should be disabled prior to the installation:

SSH to the server and execute the following:
netstat -nlp
There should be no services running on the following ports:
SMTP, Secure SMTP, POP secure POP , port 2000, port 5280 , 443
should there be then check the PID number of that service and kill it
kill pidnumber

The best way to install Citadel is by executing the easyinstall.

yum -y groupinstall "Development Tools"
yum -y install gettext shared-mime-info openssl-devel
wget -q -O - http://easyinstall.citadel.org/install | sh

Accept all default parameters (define admin as user name and give it a password)
When asked under which username to run Citadel, keep the user root

Leave the remaining as default, please do not change the default port 2000 and 443 under which Citadel wishes to run else you will never be able to access it.

Problems and issues:

  1. Was not able to configure it as LDAP (did not put much efforts anyway)
  2. Cannot change default ports although the WEBCIT config file is located under /etc/rc.d/init.d
    no matter what ports we define the webcit will refuse to honor connections until defaults are put back
    ports 2000 and 443 . Also it will only accept connections to the secure 443 port.
  3. By keeping the port 443 for citadel, we deprive nextcloud from being accessed and that is a major drawback

Can someone join efforts with me ?

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@ghost, every kind of app that need disabling of standard daemons on NS is to avoid…

Stefano, sure no issues. I thought there was interest in knowing the steps, drawbacks and side effects of installing Citadel on NS.
Surely there is a solution to make all applications/services coexist. I am here not to eliminate any applications.
If my help is appreciated then I continue else I will work in silence without sharing my experiments.

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When changing tge port for webcit, did you retart the webcit service?
Also check this from citadel support

Yes sure restarted and even rebooted the linux machine.
The Citadel support talks about Apache which is not installed on my NS7
I will try the redirect referred to on that article it might help.

don’t get me wrong… you’re free to do all you want…

just be aware that if citadel (or any other app you like) can’t work with NS’ daemons (http, smtp, pop, ldap, imap and so on) it likely won’t be adopted… same for Zarafa, Zimbra etc…

even if NS is linux, it’s not a plain centos install (you can safely install citadel on centos with no issues), and it relies on a strict integration among many services…

it’s the same if you think about SME server, Zentyal, Clearos… all of them are more than just linux.

I repeat: if you manage to make citadel work with standard services, you’re more than welcome…

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Hi @ghost I’m also playing with citadel. So maybe you 're interested in my experiences.

Me too. Neither with Open-LDAP nor with NSDC.
Tried it several times, but installation programm stucks at 95 to 97 %.
I didn’t find any log-entries related to the installation. In the txt-file in tmp-directory
I didn’t find any relevant info. Did you find something?

My installation accepts port 2443 for https and 2000 for http.

@mark_nl
I can send mails from one citadeluser to another, without installing any ns-package.



Citadel comes with it’s own servers.
But I won’t go deeper into citadel. I couldn’t figure out how it works with ldap and so it is not of interest for me on NS7. The concept with this rooms to share to other user is also a bit peculiar.

I’m using SOGo and will keep it until webtop 5 will be available.
I like the interface of wbtop and when the devs of webtop keep their promisses with caldav/groupdav I think I will change to it.

Thanks to @ghost for the hint about citadel. It’s always good to know some alternatives. I think citadel is a good and powerfull groupware, but I can’t get familiar with it’s concept and it’s GUI.

So long guys.

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