GroupWise: Andy's tips
 

• Determining if you have the sufficient amount of RAM on the server running your post office(s).
    Total up the size of all the *.DB_ (ignore any .dba, .dbb, .dbc...etc) in the PO\OffUser and PO\OffMsg directories. Ideally this total should be less that RAM available for caching, but GroupWise since version 7 has been much more efficient on memory use. As a general rule, watch the caching memory for your platform and make sure you it isn't thrashing to disk. For older GroupWise on NetWare, that total should be less than the Cache Buffer memory (Monitor, System Resources) on that server for optimum performance.
  If you can't manage that much utopian RAM,
  - on NetWare watch the LRU Sitting Time (MONITOR > Available Options > Disk Cache Utilization.) during peak usage when the server has been up a while. If the number is consistently under 1 hour and/or often dips below 30 minutes, then you really need more RAM.
  - On Linux, watch the how much free memory shows in 'free -m'.
• Is your mail system growing out of control? Regain some with these steps. Also consider the approach of a proper archival system such as Micro Focus' Retain, and/or just purging the old stuff from the live system by directing users to "Managing Overflowing Mail" . There is plenty of justification information for a proper archival system in the White pages at Osterman Research
• User moves: To monitor a move, the only real way to know it is working it to monitor the TRACKMOVE lines in the POA verbose logs. Also make sure indexing is active and can handle the number of objects being moved in a reasonable time. The default 1000 items a day will typically not cut it. Please consult TID 7012997 for how to kick the search indexer in high gear after a move has been completed.

Micro Focus single start page for GroupWise Support, Documentation, community, etc..

Yes, this page has become a bit of a raw dumping ground for GroupWise related bits. There be gold and gems to be mind in here, and I'll eventually get it better organized, though most of that will end up growing under my company's site, Konecny Consulting. Apologies for the mess of this work in process of what is essentially my GroupWise side work bench.

Useful TIDs: While some of these are old, GroupWise still uses the same basic architecture as it has since 4.1, so these are still very useful.     You can find them on your Support Connect CDs or at Micro Focus' Knowledgebase
 2933234 - GroupWise Message Store Maintenance
 2956138 - Freeing Up Disk Space on a GroupWise 5.5 PO (applies to all 5.x)
10008297 - Top Down Rebuild a GroupWise 4x system
 3347260 - Top Down Rebuild of GroupWise 5 though 2012. (a mirrored copy, that may not be up to date)
Top Down Rebuild tool for GW 14 and 18.
10012370 - GroupWise Agent Undocumented Switches.
 3564075 - eDir/NDS maint. Make sure your eDirectory is healthy as that is where parts of GroupWise is stored.
10025211 - Things you should know about GWCHECK
7013038 - Slow sync of Mobility, list of TIDs

CoolSolutions for:
- GW Best Practices
- GW 8 Good and Bad Habits
- CoolSolution script to restart GW agents that have shut down.
- Virtualization Best Practices
- CleanIt tool to fully clean out old GroupWise client installs.

- GroupWise Mobility: Trouble shooting
- dsapp - Mobility Administration Tool
- Data Synchronizer Log Diagnosing Tool
- A way to easily get lists of GW Users, Nicknames, Groups, Resources, & Domains in GroupWise 2014+
- Migrating GroupWise to new platforms
- DNSSEC, SPF, DKIM and DMARC explained, i.e. about securing your email flow.

Linux volumes:
- If on plain SLES or going that way long term, EXT3 was a good bet, but disable H-Tree Indexing. XFS or EXT4 appear to be good bets, but certainly do NOT use Btrfs at this time as there are problems with it and Databases in general. For volume types that support it, disable atime on the mount point, mostly with adding noatime in the fstab.
- On OES, NSS works great, just ensure that Salvage is turned off(especially at volume creation) and that the noatime is disabled. - nsscon, nss /volumes, nss /noatime=volumename
- Check out TID 7017545 for more optimization bits.

Other bits:
- GroupWise Error codes and Protocol Flow Diagram with Port Numbers
- Client startup options.
- GroupWise Troubleshooting Theory and Strategies from October 1999 AppNote but still very relevant.
- Official GroupWise Troubleshooting: Error Messages, Solutions to Common Problems, Message Flow and Directory Structure. Written for GW 2012 but does largely apply to most versions even if the particular tools have changed from time to time, and yes we are prodding the docs team to update these.
-GWCheck misc options that you should only run if you specifically need them, but this has all the known ones in a handy place for reference.
- Magic31's Live backup script and the full thread it is from, that combines the best of DBCopy and RSync is in the 8th post to the thread. Note a change needed in GW2014R2 and forward that DBcopy needs to be run from its home, so scripts will need an addition to run correctly of   cd /opt/novell/groupwise/agents/bin   as per Morris's note in the forums. Now TID 7017096
- Backup script on the new Microfocus Community.
- To manage the uid.run files that sometimes otherwise collect, see toldforc's contributions(now a MigrationDeletedUser) near the end this thread.
- Micro Focus' GroupWise Videos
- GroupWise 5+ Archive FID Editor v1.0 that has helped out for every version since is available in the SLD under the oldest version of GroupWise you have available.

- GroupWise Message flow hasn't really changed much since GW 5 and is always good knowledge for troubleshooting. From the official Documentation for GW 8, and GW 2012. The ports and protocol maps GW 2012, GW 2014 & GW 18 are all good references enough that I have used them for wallpaper on the GroupWise server.

- If you don't have Microsoft's Office installed, installing this newer MAPI than the old one Micro Focus is allowed to supply with the GroupWise client, may help a number 'user profile' issues. Microsoft's MAPI is a moving target, so backup and test carefully.

- Use Telnet to test SMTP issues.

- SSLizing the DVA, Article and thread

Docker and WebAccess How to influence the new GW web client and learn Docker at the same time.
docker inspect gwweb | grep -i ipaddress Marvin's GWWeb best practices

Some GW CAs were created with SHA1 which breaks things in the TLS1.2+ world. To check, issue the command
openssl x509 -text -noout -in /opt/novell/groupwise/certificates/"some long string"/ca.crt | grep -i sha
where you have to find what your particular "some long string" is.

To test what POA and MTAs are on a system and what IP:port they are listening on, issue the command
gwadmin-ipc

GWCheck Misc Switches found by Bob Jonkman that you must tread carefully with (The whole 'with great power' thing).
And then new ones coded/found since:
- deleventsbykey from TID 7005743
- newer on SUBJECTLIST and SUBJECTPURGE

Starting with GW 2014, we gained a whole new way to get at information of and even modify the system objects. Each GW server has these ReST API resources at https://ServerNameorIP:9710/gwadmin-service/static/apidocs/index.html
You can pull(get) lots of information with just a few urls you can preconfigure, as I have in my TID 7000712 shows how the details show in a verbose Contents GWCheck. Just save those huge results onto one of the linux servers (or something like CygWin) and then on there run this command to extract what you need from it.
grep -E 'Checking|granted' gwcheck.log |grep -v directory |grep -v database >proxyreport.txt

Last updated 2024-08-07

Copyright © 1996-2024 Andy Konecny

andyweb @ konecnyconsulting.ca