Zimbra Upgrade Complains About Hosts File

When upgrading Zimbra, one of the first things it does is check your hosts file for two entries. It needs a valid localhost entry (the mysql setup is sensitive about this) and it needs a valid host FQDN entry for the server itself.

It wants to see something like this:

192.168.12.5   mail.xxxxxxxxxxx.com mail
127.0.0.1      localhost.localdomain localhost

The upgrade script kept complaining that my hosts file was incorrect, but those two entries where there and they looked fine.

Here's the error (sic):

 ERROR: Installation can not proceeed.
  Please fix your /etc/hosts file

So...

It turned out that the problem was with the other entries I had in my hosts file pointing to a different host and for my IP6 entries for local host. The install script uses a simple regex to look for the two entries it wants and errors if it finds something else.

The workaround was to put a # (remark) at the beginning of all of the OTHER hosts file entries, then the script would run.

It now looks like this:

192.168.12.5   mail.xxxxxxxxxxx.com mail
127.0.0.1      localhost.localdomain localhost
# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
#::1     ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
#fe00::0 ip6-localnet
#ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
#ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
#ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
#ff02::3 ip6-allhosts

After I did that, the upgrade script ran fine. When everything was done, I removed the # entries and was back to normal. Or at least as normal as I get...