Is sweet! I was in the ATT Online class for it and am really liking what I was seeing. Very cool reporting features, some of which can be automated, and quota management has made leaps forward from where NSM was at when it first arrived.
The whole suite is what I'd consider a "must-have" for anyone struggling to manage storage space. The reporting feature is user friendly and could be easily handed over to a help desk person for routine management. I'm downloading the suite now to be dumped into my testbed. May happen over the weekend just because I'm wanting to play with it.
Oh! And I found a way to post PDFs to my blog. It requires a bit of finagling and storing the PDFs to a hosting site, but I found a freebie spot, so I should be able to get those GroupWise PDFs posted over the weekend...that is if anyone cares.
Seeing as how I don't have any official followers, I've got no idea if anyone drops by (besides Richard) to see what useless chattering I may be doing. :)
Friday, April 30, 2010
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Mini's vs. iPads
I'm not sure if you can actually compare the two as they have different target audiences and uses. Several friends already have iPads, with the majority extolling their virtues. Most are already Apple fans. Before you put on your judging hat, you should know that I've been an Apple fan since the Apple IIe - with Drol (my all time favorite game that I never beat).
I just don't totally get the iPad thing. Of course, I don't get the whole Kindle/eReader stuff either as I like to feel my books in my hands. If I'm going to pay that much for a device it better be able to do everything I need a comparably priced piece of equipment to do. And from what I can tell I'd use an iPad for, my minis fit the bill just fine at about 1/2 the cost. (Okay, so I've only paid for one, but I'm using the average retail price here as a comparison).
My minis already have wireless NICs on-board so I can connect to any available wireless in range that's available (i.e. either open or I have the key for), so I don't need or want to spend extra money getting to a 3G system. If I'm that desparate my BlackBerry will do in a pinch...and there's nothing about IT that I am that desparate for any more. I don't do much with pictures (I hate having my photo taken), and I can do without video entertainment for long stretches of time. I already get email on my BlackBerry which already makes work too readily accessible to me. So, I don't get it. For those of you that do, I'm happy for you. It looks like a cool toy.
Yes, I've had my hands on one and still don't get it. And while I have 2 iPODs I still don't get the draw of them either. I have stereos in my car, my office, and at home, CDs that can be played in them, and easily received free radio channels. I was never into boom boxes and never fully utilized my Sony Walkmans either. I do like my Shuffle though as it makes working out a bit easier and I can blast my ears with my preferred tunes over what's normally playing in the fieldhouse I work out in. Maybe I'm just getting old, or maybe I've just been in IT too long to get excited about new hardware as often.
I must admit, I wasn't sure what all I'd use a mini for either, but I had more of an idea than I do with an iPad. My problem with the minis was not having a CD/DVD drive and the added cost when they first came out brought the total cost of a mini too close to what I'd paid for my Toshiba laptop. But since winning my HP from Novell and having it run SLED I'm won over. They're great for traveling, but definitely not a laptop or desktop replacement.
Maybe there's an iPad user out there that can explain practical uses to me other than "it's cool, you can play music, or you can read books on it". Anyone? Bueller...Bueller?
I just don't totally get the iPad thing. Of course, I don't get the whole Kindle/eReader stuff either as I like to feel my books in my hands. If I'm going to pay that much for a device it better be able to do everything I need a comparably priced piece of equipment to do. And from what I can tell I'd use an iPad for, my minis fit the bill just fine at about 1/2 the cost. (Okay, so I've only paid for one, but I'm using the average retail price here as a comparison).
My minis already have wireless NICs on-board so I can connect to any available wireless in range that's available (i.e. either open or I have the key for), so I don't need or want to spend extra money getting to a 3G system. If I'm that desparate my BlackBerry will do in a pinch...and there's nothing about IT that I am that desparate for any more. I don't do much with pictures (I hate having my photo taken), and I can do without video entertainment for long stretches of time. I already get email on my BlackBerry which already makes work too readily accessible to me. So, I don't get it. For those of you that do, I'm happy for you. It looks like a cool toy.
Yes, I've had my hands on one and still don't get it. And while I have 2 iPODs I still don't get the draw of them either. I have stereos in my car, my office, and at home, CDs that can be played in them, and easily received free radio channels. I was never into boom boxes and never fully utilized my Sony Walkmans either. I do like my Shuffle though as it makes working out a bit easier and I can blast my ears with my preferred tunes over what's normally playing in the fieldhouse I work out in. Maybe I'm just getting old, or maybe I've just been in IT too long to get excited about new hardware as often.
I must admit, I wasn't sure what all I'd use a mini for either, but I had more of an idea than I do with an iPad. My problem with the minis was not having a CD/DVD drive and the added cost when they first came out brought the total cost of a mini too close to what I'd paid for my Toshiba laptop. But since winning my HP from Novell and having it run SLED I'm won over. They're great for traveling, but definitely not a laptop or desktop replacement.
Maybe there's an iPad user out there that can explain practical uses to me other than "it's cool, you can play music, or you can read books on it". Anyone? Bueller...Bueller?
GWCheck
This all actually started yesterday with an email asking how to go about finding out the mailbox sizes on a GroupWise post office. It evolved to me doing a quick search to remind myself of where GWCheck stores it's logs by default. And I thought, "hey, I should probably put this on the blog". So I am.
First off, if you're not familiar with GWCheck, it's a tool for GroupWise. It does lots of stuff, but one of the coolest things it does is a Mailbox Statistics check. It can tell you what each users mailbox size is, how many items they have in their Inbox, Sent, and Trash folders. It also lists their FIDs (handy to have should you accidentally delete someone) and any quota you may have on it. Which is exactly the information my friend was needing.
The problem was he wasn't sure where the log was stuffed. Luckily, he already had himself setup as an admin so he got the log file via email. But in case you're not so lucky, check in the /wpcsout/ofs directory under your post office directory. - i.e. /postofc/wpcsouts/ofs (adjust slashes as needed for NetWare/Linux/Windows).
Once you have the log file you use this cool little parsing tool called GWMbSize (available at http://www.anykeyonline.nl/documents/31.html). It will parse the log and give you a handy CSV that you can import into a spreadsheet and sort as need be. Slicker than snot and fairly quick and easy. I use this tool every Monday to catch users who've been created with no quota, users over their limits, or even changes to quotas that were made without following proper procedures.
Another thing I have GWCheck do is weekly maintenance on all my POAs. I'll post my defacto-standard for those checks at a later date though.
First off, if you're not familiar with GWCheck, it's a tool for GroupWise. It does lots of stuff, but one of the coolest things it does is a Mailbox Statistics check. It can tell you what each users mailbox size is, how many items they have in their Inbox, Sent, and Trash folders. It also lists their FIDs (handy to have should you accidentally delete someone) and any quota you may have on it. Which is exactly the information my friend was needing.
The problem was he wasn't sure where the log was stuffed. Luckily, he already had himself setup as an admin so he got the log file via email. But in case you're not so lucky, check in the /wpcsout/ofs directory under your post office directory. - i.e. /postofc/wpcsouts/ofs (adjust slashes as needed for NetWare/Linux/Windows).
Once you have the log file you use this cool little parsing tool called GWMbSize (available at http://www.anykeyonline.nl/documents/31.html). It will parse the log and give you a handy CSV that you can import into a spreadsheet and sort as need be. Slicker than snot and fairly quick and easy. I use this tool every Monday to catch users who've been created with no quota, users over their limits, or even changes to quotas that were made without following proper procedures.
Another thing I have GWCheck do is weekly maintenance on all my POAs. I'll post my defacto-standard for those checks at a later date though.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
How GroupWise issues prove that GWAVA's Reload Rocks!
While I was gone "something" went wrong that caused the GroupWise servers to all be manually rebooted. Nope, I still haven't gotten details on the entire scenario. What I can tell you is that the NCP mount to our domain server was not checked after the reboot to ensure it occurred. This left our post offices and domains without appropriate connectivity. Oh, everything was running, but not as well as it should have been and now I have issues that will require a rebuild of a couple of post offices. The joys of those who don't read the wiki that was setup for times such as these.
Somehow in all this mess, my VP lost critical emails and needed to get a restore done. I learned about this while sitting in the plane at the gateway, waiting for everyone else to board, on my return home from BrainShare. Thankfully my VP is a patient man (those who haven't worked for banking or hospital VP's should consider themselves lucky) and was willing to wait until I got back to the office.
I arrived back at work, sick (courtesy of the man in front of me on the plane) and having issues thinking straight. We worked out which dates were needed, and started restoring from tape,which under normal circumstances would have taken just a few hours. Whap! Out of space on the reload server. Co-worker insists that Reload stores the data "just like" a POA (which I know isn't exactly correct), tells me to restore to another location rather than grant more space. Guess what? wrong location and ran out of room again. I'm still not 100%, so I restore it all to a different spot, create a temproray restore area and - hooray! - we can see the messages we need. BUT it can't find the BLOB files because Reload is written much better than that and no it's not stored identically to a post office because that would take too much room. (No this isn't a dig, just trying to explain in a short-hand way).
So a day of finagling later, and following my co-worker's confident instructions that tape would be faster than copying the already untarred files over (causes me less grief to just go with the follow than correct the misconceptions) I finally have the TAR file untarred into the RIGHT location at last and my VP can get to his data. YAY!!! Dancing all around! Best part is, we have a common path name for all restores, whether it's from tape or current backups and regardless of the post office name. And it all works! My VP was a very patient guinea pig and it turns out we only lost 1 email that he was able to work around not having.
Had we not had Reload the backup process would have been more painful, much longer, not completed in the time frame he needed, and since we were using two different tape backup dates far more work would have been necessary. Still not convinced Reload rocks? That's okay, here's the technical reasoning (sorry you had to sit through my whining here..okay, maybe not so sorry).
Reload stores the BLOB files in a way that they don't have to be copied multiple times like they would be on a tape backup. It can be configured to create a TAR file of an entire week's data to be copied to a tape or other off-line storage system. The really cool part about the TAR files? You can extract just a single day's worth of data. If it's the first thing you're extracting from the TAR file, you'll need to grab the GRE_DATA folder as well, but once that's done, you can extract just a single date at a time if you'd like. Compare that to having to restore everything for a single date if you're using the default restore method for GroupWise. Still confused? How about a step-by-step comparision?
Scenario: UserA loses data at some point during the week of March 1st (they think), but also lost something that they knew they had sometime around mid-January. It's now April 1st, so neither dataset is on your live systems as you only store 2 weeks worth. And you have to use the standardized path name that your help desk knows; no custom restore areas allowed. What do you do?
Using GWAVA Reload:
Using GroupWise "default" method for restores
And that is why Reload Rocks.
Somehow in all this mess, my VP lost critical emails and needed to get a restore done. I learned about this while sitting in the plane at the gateway, waiting for everyone else to board, on my return home from BrainShare. Thankfully my VP is a patient man (those who haven't worked for banking or hospital VP's should consider themselves lucky) and was willing to wait until I got back to the office.
I arrived back at work, sick (courtesy of the man in front of me on the plane) and having issues thinking straight. We worked out which dates were needed, and started restoring from tape,which under normal circumstances would have taken just a few hours. Whap! Out of space on the reload server. Co-worker insists that Reload stores the data "just like" a POA (which I know isn't exactly correct), tells me to restore to another location rather than grant more space. Guess what? wrong location and ran out of room again. I'm still not 100%, so I restore it all to a different spot, create a temproray restore area and - hooray! - we can see the messages we need. BUT it can't find the BLOB files because Reload is written much better than that and no it's not stored identically to a post office because that would take too much room. (No this isn't a dig, just trying to explain in a short-hand way).
So a day of finagling later, and following my co-worker's confident instructions that tape would be faster than copying the already untarred files over (causes me less grief to just go with the follow than correct the misconceptions) I finally have the TAR file untarred into the RIGHT location at last and my VP can get to his data. YAY!!! Dancing all around! Best part is, we have a common path name for all restores, whether it's from tape or current backups and regardless of the post office name. And it all works! My VP was a very patient guinea pig and it turns out we only lost 1 email that he was able to work around not having.
Had we not had Reload the backup process would have been more painful, much longer, not completed in the time frame he needed, and since we were using two different tape backup dates far more work would have been necessary. Still not convinced Reload rocks? That's okay, here's the technical reasoning (sorry you had to sit through my whining here..okay, maybe not so sorry).
Reload stores the BLOB files in a way that they don't have to be copied multiple times like they would be on a tape backup. It can be configured to create a TAR file of an entire week's data to be copied to a tape or other off-line storage system. The really cool part about the TAR files? You can extract just a single day's worth of data. If it's the first thing you're extracting from the TAR file, you'll need to grab the GRE_DATA folder as well, but once that's done, you can extract just a single date at a time if you'd like. Compare that to having to restore everything for a single date if you're using the default restore method for GroupWise. Still confused? How about a step-by-step comparision?
Scenario: UserA loses data at some point during the week of March 1st (they think), but also lost something that they knew they had sometime around mid-January. It's now April 1st, so neither dataset is on your live systems as you only store 2 weeks worth. And you have to use the standardized path name that your help desk knows; no custom restore areas allowed. What do you do?
Using GWAVA Reload:
- Restore the TAR file from March 7th (assumption is you create TAR files on Sundays) to a location on the Reload server.
- Un-tar the contents to the default location on the Reload server (i.e. /reload/poa1).
- If time is of the essence, you can speed this up by creating a folder in the default location that matches the TAR file name (i.e. /reload/poa1/1-week1-2010), then un-tar the gre_data folder and the first date you wish to try. You can then un-tar the other dates as needed.
- In Reload Administration, select Access Backups, the correct POA profile and you'll see the new date listed.
- Select a date to load and you're good to go
- If that date isn't right, simply use the Reload Administration to unload the current set and select a different date in the TAR set to be loaded
- Repeat with new dates or TAR files as necessary
Using GroupWise "default" method for restores
- Pick a date that "may" hold the necessary data; best bet is to probably start with March 1st
- Restore the entire post office from tape to a location either on the live post office or another server (it works best if it's on the same server that hosts the post office, even if it's another volume)
- Create a Restore Area using ConsoleOne; if you're stuck using this method best bet is to have some default ones already setup
- Add the user to the Membership list for the correct Restore Area
- Grant the POA rights to that location
- Provide the user with the correct path to use
- Have the user check to see if the data needed is there, if not, go back to step one, pick another date, and repeat until data is found
And that is why Reload Rocks.
Monday, April 5, 2010
Busy, busy, busy
Been busy playing catch up after being gone a week. So I haven't posted the GroupWise stuff that I want to yet. I really need to find a way to post PDFs here. Anyone know of a way (to save me the research time)? If not, I'll figure something out.
Anyhow, for those of you that are TTP members (education customers) there's a pretty sweet deal from Novell regarding SLED. I've been busy getting that setup for work and have been downloading SLED ISOs while doing other things. I'm thinking I may whack my Dell mini configuration and reconfigure it as a SLED 11 box, just to see if it's as fast a boot as my HP mini that I love so much.
I also had the annual, "Let's screw up Mary's PartnerNet account and see how long it takes her to notice" game with Novell. Granted, my account is always a pain, it's always having issues because of my 1 foot in the customer space and 1 foot in the partner space, plus all my NUI connections. But it's fixed now, so I have access to all the perks again.
Anyhow, for those of you that are TTP members (education customers) there's a pretty sweet deal from Novell regarding SLED. I've been busy getting that setup for work and have been downloading SLED ISOs while doing other things. I'm thinking I may whack my Dell mini configuration and reconfigure it as a SLED 11 box, just to see if it's as fast a boot as my HP mini that I love so much.
I also had the annual, "Let's screw up Mary's PartnerNet account and see how long it takes her to notice" game with Novell. Granted, my account is always a pain, it's always having issues because of my 1 foot in the customer space and 1 foot in the partner space, plus all my NUI connections. But it's fixed now, so I have access to all the perks again.
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