Due to unfortunate circumstances, we had to disable a number of email accounts last month. I re-enabled them on Friday before I left. When I came in, it turns out none of the changes in made for users in a certain PO worked. Digging around online, a suggestion to rebuild the PO was one of the top hits. I went to do that and was getting “Error: Dictionary not found” errors. All the PO .DC files seemed correct. But I copied “fresh” files overtop just to be sure to eliminate possible corruption issues. No go. I installed a fresh copy of Console1 with the snapins from the GW7.01ir1 media. No go. I bounced the server. Nothing doing. I even tried a last ditch effort to reboot my workstation because I’ve had Console1 flake out in the past and a reboot solved the issue. That didn’t help either.
I finally found an obscure post in google groups about replacing the domain .DC files as well. As soon as I did that, the rebuild worked great.
Let me start by saying I think GroupWise is a pretty good groupware solution. It’s flexible nature makes life easier for me. What doesn’t, however, make life easier is its reliance on obscure files and its management tools. I find myself lost in .DB and .DC files when things aren’t working correctly. I can’t tell if this is a good thing, where the system is more modular, or if it’s an archaic hook from GroupWise of old that the engineers refuse to let go of. Making admin changes can sometimes have strange results which require you to almost guess what could be malfunctioning. The issue I had above started out because the PO didn’t update correctly. Why? Who knows, the links were fine, I didn’t lose any servers while I was making the changes.
What excaberates this even more is the management tool(s). I’m convinced of it now, Console1 should have been put out to pasture, or at the very least reincarnated as a non java based app. Either java is too slow or the engineers did a poor job performance tweaking the tool. iManager, while it doesn’t have GroupWise snapins, doesn’t seem to perform much better. Novell has to get a new management tool, one that actually performs well, is cross platform, and feature complete across the board. Hell, why not make it a mono app if you’re worried about code reuse. I won’t mind installing the mono runtime to have a proper tool. I hate to say it, but Microsoft’s MMC seems to perform far better than all of Novell’s tools since Nwadmin32.
Get on it Novell!
