GroupWise has been a mystery to me for the better part of my tenure as network admin at my job. I have not been able to devote the time to really learning it. Every day tasks have taken priority over learning GroupWise. And for the most part, there has been no reason to worry about it. Lately, I’ve been having a few issues which have brought GW to the forefront of my concerns. My students, and their related post offices, are all on a secondary domain. That server abended on gwpoa.nlm, and for some reason, lost the links between the POs and the MTA. Any new student I created wouldn’t be able to access webmail. Once those links were re-established, all seemed well…or so I thought. Some of the new teachers compalined that they couldn’t get outside email to their accounts. Testing confirmed that. The GWIA would respond with a 550, unknown user.

One aspect of GW that I’ve figured out, is that you can connect to different domains. When you connect to a secondary domain and create a user, the data should replicate itself to the primary domain by flowing up. The the reverse is true, while connected to the primary, all changes should flow down(I believe).

So while connected to the primary, I would get an error in C1 when trying to view the groupwise properites for a user created in a post office in the primary domain but while connected to the secondary domain. So the data would hit the secondary first, then move to the primary. But that wasn’t happening. Any change while connected to the primary flowed down just fine. It turned out, the domain links “upstream” were incomplete. Their were missing the port numbers. Once I added those port numbers in, things began to flow in both directions. But, I’m lost trying to figure out what happened. Either the links were never set correctly, and I just never connected to the secondary to perform any admin tasks, or the server abend mentioned above screwed up the links. I’m leaning toward the former. Although I can’t completely get my head around it.

GroupWise is a bit of a renegade when it comes to Novell products. It has got hooks into eDirectory, but most of the work is handled by non eDirectory related database tasks. I’m not sure why that is. I would think that you’d have less issues in terms of replication and message flow if eDirectory handled it. eDirectory does a pretty good job keeping itself in sync and replicates itself on auto pilot, sometimes even when there are issues. I can see having work directories and having attachments stashed in their own directories, but I don’t understand why it can’t be integrated right into eDirectory.

Although, the more and more I learn about GroupWise, the more modular and logical it seems. That seems to contradict what I just said, but it’s very modular. Messages are passed as files. If they get stuck somewhere, you know something isn’t running. The built in diagnostics tools will help as well to pinpoint problems. Experience with GroupWise will tell you where the problem is. I just need that experience! Time for GroupWise in a test environment.

I cut over our proxy traffic to our new ISP. I spent a good amount of time configuring my new proxy server for BorderManager 3.8sp3. We run surf control’s cpfilter. However, I was having a hell of a time getting the block lists to load. Even when I followed their memory allocation config file edit, it still wouldn’t load. Turns out Netware didn’t like the allocation command. Short term memory was in short supply…on a server with 4 gigs! Thankfully, there are super smart and paitient people like Hamish Speirs who coded a memory tuning NLM. Running that and making the suggested changes freed up the memory I needed to get the 500mb block list into memory. That’s off and running now with little compaint.

Over the extended weekend, I took some time to fix up my broken site. It’s not up to where I’d like it to be, but it’s a start. I moved to wordpress software, with a spam filter of some sort. I tried to import as many previous posts as possible, but it didn’t work out great. I redirected the main page to here. It’s named iDogg, for no great reason. Someone called me idogg once, so in light of using iManager and iMonitor enough these days, I thought it fit. Like I said, I need to do some cleaning up and some other management around here, but at least I have something that works!

Today was the first day of class. No major issues. We managed to iron most of them out last week during the maelstrom. I’m registered to get a sneak peak of GWAVA 4 tomorrow online. I’m looking forward to it. I’ve spent enough time in GWAVA 3.6’s smart block manager to start clamoring for something that makes rule making a bit easier than what the current version offers.