aevans's blog

It seems that many people have trouble finding files on our website, or at least finding the ones that they want - so let me give you a few pointers. Your first port of call should be http://support.novell.com/filefinder/. There is a search box right there where you can specify a module name - enter GWENN5.NLM and see what you get.

If you want to navigate around to find the Beta Patches/FTFs/Hot Fixes/Interim Releases etc yourself then use the product category links in the middle of that page - follow along - GroupWare, GroupWise 6.5. Now you are at a listing of all the GW 6.5 patches that have been officially and publically released. There are no FTFs listed here. Up at the top of the page there are a number of other links and one of them links to the FTFs:

[Click to zoom in]

This basic navigation is the same for all product categories and these pages are controlled by NTS - the support people, so we control the content. With GW7 SP1 (and Messenger 2.01) we are in an official Beta cycle, and this differs from the FTF process and is controlled by another team, so those patches appear elsewhere - confusing I know, and I think we have a project ongoing to sort all that out. The official Beta's can be found at http://www.novell.com/beta/index.jsp. Select View My Beta Page and you will see what public betas there are right now and, if you are part of a beta program, the closed betas that you are signed up for.

We are all back from Brainshare now, what a busy week that was! I hope that everyone that attended enjoyed it, I know I did - the Rattlesnake and Rabbit Sausages were the highlight for me :) I don't want to steal Jason Williams' thunder here, so prod him to tell you how they are made.

The GW migration tool proved a very popular subject, both on the Migration and Installation depot and in the tutorial from our IS&T manager - in fact it was the second most popular session on the depot, behind virtualisation on XEN.

The other popular topic of conversation was the GroupWise Mobile Server (powered by Intellisync). We are all very excited about this in the GW team, it's a huge value add to our customers and we are working very hard to get it out there, though there does seem to be a little confusion, both internally in Novell and externally, about who gets it. So, it is available to all GroupWise 7 customers if they pay maintenance or upgrade protection. We do plan to release an evaluation version publically so you can 'try before you buy'. I would encourage anyone who either doesn't currently have a mobile solution, or has issues with their current solution to at least give this a try. If you have Blackberries, or plan on rolling them out, then look here. With these 2 solutions we should be able to keep any device user happy.

I figured that I would do a quick update on a spare machine up here. I am working on the migration and installation depot helping people through the scripts and, so far, it has been pretty busy. There are about 12 different scenarios people can work though, including a GW migration from NetWare/Windows to Linux - it seems to be a popular scenario with about 6 people on it right now.

Well, hope to see some of you up here - say Hi if you see me.

I need to 'fess up and admit to being a lurker - where? On the NGW List.  And why am I admitting to it now (this feel somewhat like admitting that those magazines were, in fact, mine and not from the Vicars' son)?  Because there was a post today about Timezones, again.

Yes, parts of Indiana are now going to observe DST, where they did not before and yes, that breaks stuff.  What do I advise you to do? Nothing.  Let me explain the conundrum.  Imagine that last year someone sent out an appointment for 10am April 5 2006 in Indiana.  At that time their workstation did not know about the whole DST thing going on.  To store the appointment in GW the client takes the appointment time, subtracts the GMT offset (-8?) and subtracts the DST Bias (0).  The time stored in GW would be 5pm.  Sometime later you update your workstation TZ with the DST information.  Now what happens to the appointment is we take the stored time, which is called UTC (5pm), we add the GMT offset (-8) and add the DST Bias (1) - the appointment has moved to 11am.

'No problem' you think, I'll just get out the appointment time adjuster and change the time.  Wrong.  The problem now is that you have appointments in the PO that have both the correct UTC stored, and the incorrect UTC and GW has no way of knowing which one is which, and the appointment time adjuster just changes them all.

Really, all that you can do is send a notice for people to reschedule their appointments that are in the affected times - in Indiana's case, this is unfortunately anything between April and October.  In those places where it only shifts a week, then only appointments in that week are affected.  You shouldn't do this until the workstations have been updated though.

Now my head hurts and I am going to sign off.  I'll revisit it again, if anyone finds this useful?

I was off contemplating writing a TID and happened upon an existing one for the TZ changes in Oz. As old Queenie is already down there opening the games this may be a little belated, but here's the link

I have been getting a lot of questions recently about all of the impending timezone changes and what Novell is doing. In fact, whilst writing this I had someone at my door with that very question. In my opinion these issues are probably more widely impacting than anything that Y2K brought us, and I wish that governments would just leave it alone. I know that there are places in the world where timezones are a constantly moving target, Israel I think changes their Daylight Savings start and end almost yearly and I have it on good authority from a Muslim colleague that many Muslim countries change their DST start and end to shorten the days during Ramadan. The difference between these places, and what is happening in Australia, Indiana and the US as a whole, is that it's been happening for years and the locals know how to deal with it. The problem is that when the US has their mass change next year (has the bill even been passed yet?) the whole world needs to adjust to the change.

Time issues are always tricky and are guaranteed to bring a groan from any support engineer. If you came to our office in March or October you'd see us all walking around looking at our watches, moving imaginary hands with our fingers wearing puzzled expressions and trying to figure out questions like 'if it was 2pm on March 29 and DST didn't shift in Canada, then what colour shirt would President Mbeki be wearing?' Well not quite, but that's how it feels sometimes.

So, what is GroupWise development doing about this? The answer is nothing. Surprising answer maybe? Well, I'll expand on it and I also plan to write a TID. For the most part GroupWise takes it's time from the workstation, so as long as the workstation time and timezones are correct you should be ok. The other place we take time from is the server OS, so the same applies there. There are two exceptions:

1. WebAccess
2. ConsoleOne Timezone administration

WebAccess follows the time assigned to the PostOffice and GW has a number of Timezone defintions that are changable in ConsoleOne (Tools | GroupWise System Operations | Timezones). Anyway, that's enough for now, but I'll be revisiting this again soon.

BTW, white with blue stripes is the answer. :)