GroupWise Maintenance

Andy's Technotes Home

GroupWise Maintenance Routines

Full maintenance/repair routines to be done before conversions and at least once a year
Always make sure you have a current complete backup before doing this.
One particularly part to secure, you should at least periodically manually make a local copy of the PrimaryDomain\wpdomain.db when all the agents and management consoles are down. Making periodic copies of all the Domain\wpdomain.db and PostOffice\wphost.db files is also a good practice as those are files that are always locked while the agents are up, and are hardest for backup systems to get a copy of. DBcopy is your friend to learn, even if only to grab periodic copies of the *.db files, or for real protection a tool such as Reload can help make life a whole lot more protected and easy for administration.
These instructions assume a basic understanding of the tools in question. If you have never seen the tools mentioned, then it is highly suggested that you consult with an appropriate expert or RTFM
Unless otherwise instructed: if there are error messages, stop and get them figured out. Call co-workers, your favorite integrator (hopefully that is me, or my friend Andreas ;), and/or Novell if necessary.

For regular maintenance/repair (once a week to once a month)
All you really need to run is an Analyze & Fix of the Structure for both User and Msg databases.
In GroupWise 5 and up, this can be automated and is best to be set when the active user count is the lowest and the system isn't doing anything else, such as Sunday AM for many environments.
Except where noted, the following steps work for all versions of GroupWise from 5.1 to current, Where GW 5.x steps being in NWAdmin32 and GW 6 and up being in ConsoleOne. The standalone GWCheck.exe can be used for much of the manual steps but is best used when the Post Office Agent is shut down to avoid conflicts.

For any conversion/major upgrade/migration, and at least once a year: Novell TID 3347260 (formerly 10007365)

For automated maintenance that handles most of the above step. Then all you need to do is check the logs periodically.

Andy's general GroupWise tips, tricks, and useful TIDs.

If you happen to have a really old system work with, do consider a consultant who has worked with the versions in question as there is no offical support for these older versions (just like Microsoft doesn't support DOS or Windows95).
For GW 4.0a being converted to 5.x:
For GW 4.1a being converted to 5.x: and to be run once every 6 months or so.

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