I’ve always had a problem having to ask somebody to check and tell me what their computer name is or do some digging via their login name and logged in workstation before I was able to start a remote session. Mprikril on Novell’s cool solutions website posted a great looking process to alleviate that issue.
http://www.novell.com/communities/node/6116/zenworks-desktop-cool-and-fast-remote-control-solution
I finally got around to pulling another NetWare 5.1 server which first served as our Bordermanager proxy server, then was moved to GroupWise GWIA duty. Once I installed our SLES 10 box to run our GWIA, the NetWare server was just spinning its fans. It served its purpose well. There’s just one remaining 5.1 server left. That server is the devil machine I mentioned before. I fully expect to tear a hole in the universe when I try to pull that one out of the directory tree. Daemons will spill out and attempt to destroy the world. Make sure you have plenty of canned food, water, and lots of toilet paper.
Anyone having to admin an email system of any size knows the pain and irritation that spam can cause on a user base, and in turn, yourself. We have been using Gwava for our spam filtering tool for years now. It has never been perfect. While the idea behind Gwava over competitors(beyond the GroupWise integration) is that it can be tailored to fit your organization as opposed to having to rely on 3rd party rule sets like what I think Barracuda and other appliances do. The downside to that is that there’s a level of baby sitting that needs to be done to get it working. The latest version(4) takes less manual labor than version 3.6.
I sometimes wonder if it’s worth the effort however. I’m in a position where I’m a jack of all trades right now. Today I spent time getting an analog phone worked into our VoIP system, tracking down a file locking issue with an ancient library application, and building an image for a laptop. I don’t really have the time to babysit a spam filter. Thankfully the good people at Gwava helped me out today to get our Gwava system back on the right track. We were having an extreme false positive issue. The filter was grabbing everything. Under the probability scoring system, by default, anything about 99.9% probability is automatically deleted and not reported. The scanner was tagging almost everything at 100% probability chucking mail into the void. Great.
Hopefully the work we did today will be the long term fix. At any rate, Gwava is a nice piece of software, assuming you have the time to learn it and work with it everyday. I do not at the moment.
From Cisco.com…..
MGCP gateway
Cisco Unity is unable to record messages for more than 50 seconds because the receive-rtcp timer times out on the MGCP gateway and the call gets disconnected. Disable the timer with these commands in the MGCP gateway in order to solve the problem due to disconnect of the call.
MGCPGateway(config)#no mgcp timer receive-rtcpThis command turns off the RTP RTCP receive timeout interval at the MGCP gateway.
MGCPGateway(config)#voice rtp send-recvThis command is used in order to establish a two-way voice path when the Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP) channel is opened.
I’ll have to do this after hours and do some testing to see if the length of a voice mail will be extended.
I admin the traditional “server room” setup. Multiple servers, each with their own OS and their own specific task. Sometimes I’m forced to double up applications or tasks on one box. Generally, I prefer to keep one specific duty to one server. That way, I can make things less complicated during an update, and losing a single box generally won’t seize the motor so to speak. The downside to this is that I have to have more hardware on hand. We have a fairly modest server setup. Most of the servers live in a standard 19″ Dell rack. I have a mishmosh of 2U and 1U Dell Poweredge boxes of various age and capacity. I have a few non Dell boxes in another rack. Being a non profit, we tend to run servers until the wheels fall off.
Every piece of critical equipment is hooked to one of four stand alone UPS units. That includes servers, network switches, monitors and KVMs. When I first started in the position, we dismantled a large freezer which freed up capacity on the building backup generator. With the help of district staff, we were able to put in four 20 amp curcuits which in the event of losing utility power, would be fed from generator power. The UPS batteries only needed to hold on for a minute or two until the generator came online and the power was regulated.
That’s enough back story. The other afternoon, the main transformer for the building caught fire and we lost power. The generator came online, but not all of my batteries switched back to “utility” power. I began to lose servers. To make matter worse, the fire was 30 feet or so from the generator which is powered by natural gas. The fire department had us kill the motor. The rest of the servers went offline and the room was dark and quiet. This episode exposed a bunch of problems with our data center. First, one of the emergency circuits was tripped. Each circuit runs 12 gage copper and can’t really be changed to a 30 amp breaker without new wiring. Second, the emergency generator is almost at its max on load. The load is spread out best as possible, but the total load is getting to be too much. Finally, even if I could keep all of the equipment running, I can’t cool the room during an extended power outage. That forces me to bring non critical equipment offline. The insult to injury during this event was, no lights in the room were tied into the emergency circuits. Try working with a flashlite in your mouth. Good fun all around.
This is your rock and hard place. I can’t lessen the load without spending money on a virtual infrastructure. Conversely, to increase “IT” capacity and allow for air conditioning, we need an all new generator and new circuits run to the data center. From my point of view, we have to do both. We can keep the 20 amp circuits assuming we go the VM route. That way, I can just virtualize all the one off servers onto a few bare metal boxes depending on the strategy. Secondly, some provisions have to be made to incorporate cooling into the mix.
And finally, a light or two would be nice…
I forgot a username/password for a website that I needed access to. I had to wait until I got home to dig up a hard copy that had my account# on it. That’s a pain in the butt. Opensuse 11 comes preloaded with gpg. Below is a link to a quick tutorial on how to use it to encrypt single files. I’m thinking I’m going to put my obscure usernames/passwords in a file, encrypt it with gpg, and be able to access it whenever I have a machine with gpg on it.
On the other hand though, putting anything private in electronic form is a risk. Anyone ever do this? What are your opinions? Drop me a message.
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-how-to-encrypt-and-decrypt-files-with-a-password.html
Work was empty on Friday so I had planned on moving the GWIA from an old 4u Dell Poweredge running NetWare 5.1 to a nice and tidy 1u PE 1950 running SLES 10. Actually, I ended up not transfering the domain and gateway, rather I created both new. The domain install and config was quick and painless. The GWIA install and config was not quick and painless. There were two “gotchas” which I ran into. The first gotcha was that the GroupWise system needs to be told which GWIA to send outbound mail to. Makes perfect sense. You can find that setting in C1:
Tools/GW System Operations>Internet Addressing>Internet Agent for outbound SMTP/MIME messages:
That got outbound message flowing. The next step was inbound. I couldn’t figure out why inbound message processing just wasn’t working. I was banging my head against the wall until I saw a vague novell forum posting mentioning postfix fighting with the GWIA. A quick trip into yast’s runlevel module showed that postfix was indeed running. Shutting that off and restarting the gwia agent allowed inbound messages to flow in.
1pm: Feeling my oats I decided to move the domain for some large post offices to the cluster. The domain resided on the other remaining Netware 5.1 server. This server has some mental issues. It has been around for longer than I have, logically anyway. What I mean by that is the server began life as a Netware 3.12 server on different hardware. It then got a software upgrade to Netware 4.11. Then a hardware upgrade to a Dell PE server. Then another software upgrade to NetWare 5.1. And finally another hardware upgrade to a Dell PE 2650. This happened over roughly a ten to fifteen year period. I’ve had plenty of problems with this server. Disk I/O is completely screwed up. Writing to or deleting from the volumes takes multiple times over the amount of time it should. GW domain maintenance operations on the box generally called for a database rebuild to get anything moving. I had GWAVA 3.6 which vomited tens of thousands of .log files for every piece of mail recieved into the files system, already straining the tired traditional file system based volumes. In the event of a server abend, an automatic vrepair to the sys volume(I didn’t mention everything was loaded on the sys volume for some unknown reason) would render the server useless for up to 7 hours. To sum it all up, a painful experience.
At any rate, I shut down the MTA and GWAVA. I copied the domain to the cluster resource(NetWare). I installed GWAVA4 on the resource as well. I got the MTA up and running, but the post offices wouldn’t see a differnet outbound MTP IP address. I tried rebuilding the domain, restarting the POAs, nothing seemed to work. I decided to pull the plug due to the time. I moved the domain back and all of the sudden the POAs were seeing the new domain IP. Crap! I moved the domain back to the new location and messages finally started to flow. I created a new GWAVA4 scanner and set up basic notification digests and called it a day.
Fast forward to today. I came in and started to do some cleanup work, specifically fixing the cluster resource load scripts to load the MTA up and shut it down. I noticed that one of the cluster nodes, the node that was running GWAVA and the MTA wiped out early this morning at some point. So, GWAVA loaded up on the next node, but no MTA. I fixed that piece and got the busted node back online. I migrated the resource and the server immediately abended. It migrated the resource over to the next node, which promptly abended. Thankfully the resource went comatose before it could completely wipe out the entire cluster. To get to the point, GWMTAVS.NLM has some serious bug which will drag NetWare to its knees. I quickly decided to ditch GWAVA on NetWare and put in on the SLES box with the GWIA and just do a GWIA scanner.
Things to remember:
On Novell’s Communities site, I stumbled onto this posting. I’m not sure if I agree with all of the points made, but it certainly hits on some major issues. In my own personal viewpoint, the management tool piece is one that I’ve complained about myself. If you’re an experienced GroupWise admin, it’s worth a read.
Maybe this is just a Suse thing I’m going to complain about, but I can’t stand having to deal with Samba. Any time I have to set up Samba shares on one of our suse boxes, it always seems more difficult than it needs to be. Maybe this is due to a lack of formal training on my part.
I like NCP, the Novell Client and eDirectory. I hate SMB, smbmount, Windows Domains, Primary Domain Controllers, Backup Domain Controllers and basically anything derived from the windows network/directory model.
All I want to do is login to a tree, map a drive, or even just put in \\server\volume as a path and start working. There seems to be a rather large disconnect in my mind when it comes to workstations interacting with non NCP based servers. NFS is an option that I will have to look into at some point.
Again, my lack of knowledge in this area is probably a large source of my frustration. If anyone has any proper tutorials or reading material on this subject that might help me, I’d apprecaite it.
NCPMount command:
# ncpmount -A 10.10.10.10 -S server1 -U username.context -V sys /media/whatev