aevans's blog

I need to precede this post with a bunch of disclaimers. This is not a supported configuration, it has not been tested by either GroupWise or SuSE engineering and I personally have not played with it enough to see if anything else is broken, however, it is possible to get the GroupWise client running on openSUSE 10.3.

When trying to install the RPM I got a number of libXm.so.3 dependency errors, so I installed:

openmotif-libs-32bit
openmotif-libs
openmotif22-libs-32bit
openmotif22-libs
openmotif

Probably overkill, but it installed after adding all of those. Oh, and I had first added a bunch of 'community repositories' which I think these were installing from.  Once installed the GroupWise client still does not launch.

The last thing that you need to do is to modify /opt/novell/groupwise/client/bin/groupwise.   On the line after the first export enter:

 export LIBXCB_ALLOW_SLOPPY_LOCK=1

The whole file now reads:

#!/bin/bash
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/novell/groupwise/client/lib:/opt/novell/groupwise/client/jre/lib/i386
export LIBXCB_ALLOW_SLOPPY_LOCK=1
/opt/novell/groupwise/client/bin/groupwise-bin "$@"

Save that file and launch the client again - it should now work.

It's been a few weeks since I last blogged so what have I been up to?  Well, one of the most recent things was dealing with DST in New Zealand.  Just like the US they moved their start and end dates.  We tackled it by licensing a custom made module for Omni Riva.  The module inserts a query folder into everyones mailbox that displays all appointments in the extra weeks of DST.  Riva has a large amount of other modules already available.

We are approaching closed Beta for GroupWise Bonsai and GMS on Linux is already in closed Beta so our engineering teams are working flat out.  Teaming+Conferencing is also in closed beta right now and it's looking good.  The other thing that we are about to embark on is nailing down the features for GroupWise Monterrey, which is the version after Bonsai.  All in all, October is going to be a busy month.

There are a mountain of other things that I am working on right now, which I will be sure to blog about when I am able to.  And of course, a few of us are in Miami next week for GW Advisor, which looks like it will be good week.

Dean, myself, our marketing guy Gregory and the lead developer on the Windows client (Scott) are headed to Miami at the end of September to participate in the GWAdvisor Summit. What's interesting about his show is that this is the first show since GroupWise Bonsai was code complete (so we have Bonsai in all it's glory for you to play with) and where Teaming and Conferencing will also feature prominently. There is also a chance for you to win a Wii (I have one now and I love it!) and participate in a focus group - where you can tell us all of your GroupWise, and Teaming and Conferencing needs. It's taking place September 30 to October 4 at the Doral Resort and Spa. All being well you can click on the graphic above to get to the GWAdvisor page - if not here's the link again

It wasn't so long ago that I wrote that I was leaving the GroupWise Backline team and taking on a new role as PSE - which meant that I was focused solely on 4 customers and, whilst it formed a big part of my day, GroupWise was not the only product that I worked on.  Well, I am now back in the GW fold as GroupWise Product Manager.  I could not be more thrilled - GroupWise has been my daily life for nearly 9 years and it is where my heart lies, so it is great to be back working on it full time again and in a position where I can really make a difference.

I hope to get a few more technical howtos written before the lobotomy kicks in - but a big part of my life going forwards is going to be getting ready for the Bonsai release.

Like Dean I am going to be at the Advisor summit at the end of September so I hope to see a lot of you there.

Dean already mentioned that we had some Bonsai milestone 3 Demos last week which were very interesting.  I am very excited about this new release.  What he didn't mention were a couple of things that are hidden under the covers in the POA code.  I'll go into them in more detail at some future juncture but a quick overview and why I am so excited:

The first one is an overhaul of the Purge code.  Over the last year or so we have seen an upswing in the number of 'slow Post Office' calls and, invariably, it's the SAN that is slow and not able to respond back to the OS quickly enough.  A lot of the time there are a large number of i/o requests coming from GroupWise and often this is caused by lots of users having auto-archive enabled.  Essentially, what auto-archive does is download the mail, purge it from the databases and then send any status tracking updates.  This is an expensive operation.  This purge code change will batch those updates and move them to another thread so that the client is not needing to wait on them to complete (and not holding the thread so it's not available to other users).  I am particularly excited about this change.

The second change is in the HTTP interface of the POA and is probably more useful for GMS troublshooting than anything else.  I had an incident this year that kept me on the phone for something like 30 hours straight and we ended up calling in developers from vacation to help troubleshoot.  We held a post-mortem afterwards and felt that we didn't have enough information at hand to really get to the root of the problem quickly enough - hence these changes.  When I get a chance I will include screenshots, but the enhancements include the ability to see which users are registered with the event notification system, what their status is and the option to manually fire off an event notification trigger to anything listening for those notifications (GMS mainly, but also BES and any home grown SOAP apps you may have).

So, like I said these are pretty much hidden under the covers but will have a big impact.

As most of you know all the traffic between GW agents and between the client and the POA is already encrypted using a proprietary encryption method. There are some verticals that require a particular standard of encryption and this is where encrypting using SSL certificates come into play. In my last post I covered securing the HTTP interface of your agents. If you followed that you have actually done most of the groundwork for securing all the other protocols too.

Read on:

I am not going to cover creating the certificates and key files again, or installing them - check out my last post for that. What I am going to show you here is how to enable it on the other protocols (and the observant amongst you will notice that I am running Bonsai snapins - so all disclaimers regarding 'content may not reflect reality' apply here.)

Well, it's really easy once you have got the certificate and key installed and working. The easiest way to check it's working is to make sure that the HTTPS interface works. If so then just go and enable SSL for the other protocols:

MTA

POA

From the POA screenshot you can see that I have set Internal Client/Server and IMAP to 'Enabled', instead of 'Required'. I just wanted to point out that those 2 had an additional option and to explain the difference. Required on the protocol means that if the other side of the link does not support SSL then communication attempts will fail. Enabled means that if the client can do SSL then it will, otherwise the POA will still allow regular communications. It is also worth noting that SSL does not replace the GW encryption, it is just wrapping the already encrypted GW packet in an SSL wrapper.

If you get this set up correctly then you will see a padlock icon in the client to signify that is communicating over SSL:

Doing this you can secure all protocols that GroupWise uses.  Currently the only place that you can't secure with SSL, though it is still encrypted, is the link between the WebAccess Application and the WebAccess Agent.

I think that's it - the next post will cover client certificates, mail signing and mail encryption.