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.
