Best Practices for Novell GroupWise on Linux

Best Practices for

Novell® GroupWise® on Linux

Dana Palmer Patti BrooksProduct Lead GroupWise QA EngineerNovell GroupWise Support [email protected]@novell.com

© Novell, Inc. All rights reserved.2

Topics Covered

• Where to Start

• File Systems

• Run Agents as daemons

• Running Agents as Non-Root

• Administration (ConsoleOne®)

• GWMonitor – GWHA

• General GroupWise® Best Practices


Where to Start

New to Linux? Dip your foot in the pool– Start by adding redundant GroupWise® components

> Additional WebAccess Application and Agent

> GWIA devoted to POP and IMAP

– Time to go halfway: Introduce your IT staff to Linux> Add a Post Office that supports your IT organization

> Add a GWIA devoted to inbound or outbound mail

– All the way in: Use the Migration Utility to move existing GroupWise pieces

> Create a routine

> Wait to move the CEO/CIO Post Office until comfortable with the procedure


Which File System Should be Used?

The Most Asked Question at BrainShare® and other trade shows

– The suggested Linux file system for GroupWise® is Ext3. This was announced by GroupWise Product Manager, Alex Evans, at GWAVACon in January of 2009

– The big 3: Ext3 and NSS and Reiserfs are all supported file systems for GroupWise 7 and 8


Ext3 – Pros and Cons

• Pros

– Better journaling and recovery tools

– Very close to Reiserfs in speed

• Cons

– Not supported using Ext3 with Htree


Reiserfs – Pros and Cons

• Pros

– Optimized for small files

– Very fast

• Cons

– Tools for recovery are limited

– Future support is questionable


NSS (Novell Storage Services™)Pros and Cons

• Pros– Moving NSS SAN partitions can be easily done from

NetWare® to Linux– Very good for Novell Cluster Services™ Support

• Cons– Features that make NSS great for all-purpose files system

can add overhead– Note: Turn Salvage OFF

• Additional Information– For best performance add NOATIME and NODIRATIME

parameters to NSS file system parameters. (See the OES SP2 NSS documentation for details.)


Running GroupWise® Agents as Daemons• For better performance, GroupWise® Linux agents should

be run as daemons

– 10% overhead to run with GUI

– Xwindow not required

• Agents can be monitored by viewing from a Web browser

– Troubleshooting options available from the browser

– Flexibility of viewing from other workstations

Demonstration:Agents from a Browser


Running Agents as Non-Root User

Running any agent in Linux as root is considered a security risk

– File system access is unlimited

– Crashes to the OS while running as root can have bad consequences to the file system


Process for Running a GroupWise® Agent as Non-Root• Create a Linux user to run the agents

– useradd -s /bin/false gwagent

• Create /etc/opt/novell/groupwise/agents/uid.conf

– Edit the file with only the name of the agent user

• Delete uid.run from domain, gwia & post office directories

• Bring down all GroupWise Agents (rcgrpwise stop)

• Start the Agents (rcgrpwise start)

• Agents create a uid.run file in domain/po/gwia directory

• Ownership of the files also changes

Demonstration:Running Agents as Non-root


Administering through ConsoleOne®

• Administration using ConsoleOne on Linux is best done from the server that owns the domain

– Especially true for Gateways which use a number of relative paths

• Administering a GroupWise® system running on Linux can be done with ConsoleOne running in Windows

– Caution needs to be taken in this scenario> See TID 3036467> Setting the Cross Protocol Lock setting on the server will restart Edirectory

• Administering using ConsoleOne on a Linux workstation that has the Novell® Linux Client is not supported and can cause file corruption

Demonstration:Remote GroupWise® Administration


Using GWMonitor on Linux

The GroupWise® Monitor agent on Linux can help to maximize the uptime of a GroupWise system

– Monitor can be used to automatically restart a GroupWise agent that displays as being down

– The gwha.conf file is used to launch the agents with the correct parameters

Demonstartion:GroupWise® Monitor


General GroupWise® Best Practices

• Size of post offices

• Disk Access

• Regular Maintenance

• Policies

– Expire and Reduce

– Size Limitations


Subscribe for OS Updates

Subscribe to update servers for OS

– Available for SLES and OES

– Security Patches


Top GroupWise® Linux TIDs

Technical Information Documents (TIDs) for GroupWise Linux

3407855 – Moving a Post Office to Linux3248145 – Installing Webaccess (7.x) on SLES 103775622 - Troubleshooting GW Slow Performance7004510 – Webaccess Crashes after update to 8.07004485 – ConsoleOne Crashes on SLES 11


Review of Key Areas

• You can implement GroupWise® at your own pace• Ext3 is the recommended file system on Linux

– NSS and ReiserFS are supported file systems

• Do not run your GroupWise agents as the root user• ConsoleOne® is best run from the server where the

domain is located• Using GroupWise Monitor can increase your server

uptime• Follow general GroupWise Best Practices


“Why didn't I migrate sooner?”

Customer feedback

Question and Answer

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