We had a few people who were shellacked by spam backscatter today. My first reaction was to bring the GWIA(SMTP agent for non GroupWise admins) offline to stop the flood of bounce backs. This was my first extended experience with this happening to us. I wasn’t even sure what the problem would be called. Thoughts were racing through my head about an army of zombie machines pumping out spam from within our walls. I practically lost my cool, convincing myself I had no business being the email admin because I had no idea what the problem was called even after I figured out what was going on. Thankfully my boss found the correct terminology and that got me going to where I could tweak our spam filter rules.

Even still, I’ve found myself feeling like I have large gaps in my knowledge base and that I need some real training with some of the systems. There’s a lot to learn even about systems I have plenty of experience with.

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.

This is my third attempt at writing this. Wordpress keeps deciding to eat itself everytime I try to post this and I lose it. I figured I’d try to act smart and write this in OO.org writer before I try to save it here.

When GroupWise is running well, life is good, it’s a great product. When it goes bad, I curse its very existence. That’s a pretty generic comment that can be said for just about every piece of software short of the CD command.

GroupWise has some quirks that I’m slowly unearthing as I get deeper into my admin role with it. I just moved, after 2 hours of beating on it, a post office onto the cluster. My gripes come into play with the administration of the system. Console1 decided to continually crap itself while I was trying to edit the PO/POA objects. That’s obviously an isolated issue. However, when I tried to bring the PO online, something with the MTP settings was goofed, along with a message about restarting the agent for new settings to change. That didn’t work. I tried to rebuild the post office at that point.

I finally remembered that I need to be connected to the parent domain, which won’t necessarily be the primary domain depending on how your system is setup to run a rebuild. Once I finally sorted that out, I still couldn’t get the PO online. I finally commented everything out in the startup script aside from the home switch.

I guess my point to all this is, GroupWise has some strange quirks, held over from the “olden” days. It’s very modular, almost to a fault, but I guess that’s the price you have to pay for having an enterprise groupware package that you can span over multiple servers and multiple operating systems at the same time and have it work properly between all of them. There are a couple things I would like to see down the road. First, I’d like to see a proper management tool. Console1 is usable, but it leaves a lot to be desired. It can be crippled if your java virtual machine is having issues, which java Vms always seem to have. Also, I’d like to see better errors in the console/logs. “The post office must be restarted…” is a pretty vague phrase and only adds to what can be a needle in a haystack problem finding excursion. On the flip side though, I don’t have to deal with Exchange and Active Directory, so life’s not all bad!

Also, a bit off topic, but if you’ve tried OpenSuse and it’s been painfully slow you might want to try a different package manager. Run top from a bash prompt and see if updater-helper or something along those lines is eating CPU cycles. If it is chances are it’s the default package manager in OpenSuse, ZMD, spinning its wheels and seemingly doing nothing. OpenSuse is supposed to dump ZMD in version 10.3, but why wait for the rush. Dumping ZMD has turned my laptop from almost unusable to almost zippy. Not too bad for a laptop that has been my trusty workhorse for 4+ years.