This is Part 5. Engineering will very quickly be winding down the changes and new development that will be in the Windermere release. Engineering continues to find things they want to share and socialize with the GroupWise Community.

This series of Windermere technical updates have served to educate not only GroupWise Administrators, but also Technical Services, Consulting and Dedicated/Premium support personnel. In addition, the discussions have allowed engineering to publicly weigh assumptions and decisions. Thank you for continuing to read along, comment, and participate in these important topics.

Internet Addressing

Internet Addressing has been around for almost two decades. Engineering has decided to make a small change to the default behavior for this capability. Beginning with Windermere, Internet Addressing will be facilitated and encouraged by default. This will only affect systems that are newly created with Windermere code. Existing systems will continue to either have Internet Addressing enabled or disabled depending on the system that is being upgraded. While rare, there are still GroupWise shops who have not enabled Internet Addressing.

Now during the initial configuration process of creating a new GroupWise system, the administrator will be prompted to specify an Internet domain name and the GWIA will be installed in the primary domain. As a result, Internet Addressing is enabled for the new GroupWise system.

You can go through this process *without* specifying an Internet domain name and installing the GWIA . If you do, Internet Addressing is *not* enabled. In other words, these are no longer separate steps and is included in the process of creating a new system.

As a result of this decision, the documentation will change their approach to this subject by representing the idea of "Here's how you set up your Internet domain name" rather than explaining how "default" GroupWise addressing (user.po.dom) works and why it would be a good idea to enable Internet addressing.

This change to the default behavior for Internet Addressing is a precursor to completely removing this option in a future release of GroupWise. This means that in some future release, GroupWise will only support systems with Internet Addressing and therefore an option to enable/disable will become obsolete.

Note: The GWIA will no longer be treated as an optional gateway, but an integral part of GroupWise. The GWIA uses Internet Addressing always.

Gateway Links in the Link Configuration Tool

The Gateway Link Types will be removed for Windermere. Flash: We have changed our direction. See latest blog. http://www.novell.com/communities/node/14133/groupwise-windermere-we-listened.

System Maintenance Utilities

As part of Windermere, engineering is making the system maintenance commands available through a command line utility on Windows and Linux. The command line utility will be called "gwadminutil"

Some of the system maintenance commands can be run both from the web-based admin console as well as the command line: validate, recover, rebuild, reclaim space, rebuild indexes, replace primary with secondary

Other commands will only available from the new command line utility: sync primary with secondary, convert secondary to primary, merge external, release secondary, reset admin credentials.

It is this second set of commands that motivated the creation of the new command line utility. Each of these commands (with the exception of reset admin credentials) requires simultaneous file access to two domain databases to run. To implement these through the web console would require the administrator to mount drives on the computer running the admin service to both domain databases before running the command from the web UI. This seems to violate the usefulness of a web interface if the admin has to SSH into the admin service and mount drives before completing an operation.

Here is the usage doc for the new Command Line Interface (CLI):

usage: gwadminutil validate <path>
example: gwadminutil validate /gw/dom1
Validate checks for physical consistency. If problems are found, you
should perform a Recover or a Rebuild.

usage: gwadminutil recover <path>
example: gwadminutil recover /gw/dom1
Recover can be performed even while the database is in use. Any database
inconsistencies will be corrected, but may result in loss of information.

usage: gwadminutil reclaim <path>
example: gwadminutil reclaim /gw/dom1
Reclaiming space may reduce the size of the database by eliminating any
unused space.

usage: gwadminutil reindex <path>
example: gwadminutil reindex /gw/dom1
Rebuild listing indexes reconstructs the indexes used by the Address Book.

usage: gwadminutil rebuild -d <path> -n <name> -o <path>
example: gwadminutil rebuild -p /gw/dom1 -n Dom1.Po1 -o /tmp
Rebuild requires exclusive access. For domains, a new database will be
created from the information in the primary domain. For post offices, a
new database will be created from the information in the parent domain.

-d,--domain <path> Path to domain database that owns object being rebuilt
-n,--name <name> Name of domain or post office object to be rebuilt
-o <path> Output path for rebuilt database

usage: gwadminutil sync -d <path> -p <path>
example: gwadminutil sync -p /gw/dom1 -d /gw/dom2
Synchronize primary with secondary ensures that each record in the
secondary domain has a matching record in the primary domain database.

-d,--domain <path> Path to secondary domain database
-p,--primary <path> Error prompting for password. Please specify password on the command line

usage: gwadminutil convert -d <path> -p <path>
example: gwadminutil convert -p /gw/dom1 -d /gw/dom2
Convert to primary promotes a secondary domain to primary. The existing
primary domain for the system becomes a secondary domain.

-d,--domain <path> Path to new primary domain database
-p,--primary <path> Path to current primary domain database

usage: gwadminutil release -d <path> -p <path> -n <name>
example: gwadminutil release -p /gw/dom1 -d /gw/dom2 -n Released
Release domain removes a secondary domain from the current system and
begins a new system with the released domain as the new primary domain.

-d,--domain <path> Path to database of domain being released
-n,--name <name> Name of new system
-p,--primary <path> Path to the primary domain database

usage: gwadminutil merge [-mergesync] -d <path> -p <path>
example: gwadminutil merge -p /gw/dom1 -d /gw/dom2 -mergesync
Merge brings an external domain into the current system as a new secondary
domain.

-d,--domain <path> Path to external domain database
-mergesync Merge external system synchronization information from the external domain
-p,--primary <path> Path to primary domain database

usage: gwadminutil setadmin -d <path> -p [<password>] -a <name>
example: gwadminutil setadmin -d /gw/dom1 -a admin -p
Set the username and password for the system admin

-a,--admin <name> New system admin name
-d,--domain <path> Path to domain database
-p,--password <password> New system admin password

The gwadminutil will be installed as part of the GroupWise server. On Windows, c:\program files\groupwise server\admin and on Linux /opt/novell/groupwise/admin

Macros

As part of some general clean up that is happening as the Web Admin Console is being created, engineering is removing options and settings that no longer apply. In ConsoleOne, under Client Options > Security Options, there's a Macros tab. This tab and all of its corresponding settings will be removed in Windermere. All current settings already stored in the different databases will be maintained. The administrator will no longer be able to control this setting.

Addresssing Rules

Currently, you can use the Addressing Rules feature to configure GroupWise so that users can enter shortened forms of email addresses for use through GroupWise gateways. However, all of the gateways are currently legacy products and not supported with current versions of GroupWise. Therefore, engineering is considering removing Addressing Rules from the product. The current proposal is that this functionality will eventually be deprecated.

Gateways were the most common reason to configure an Addressing Rule, but they were not the only reason. Addressing rules are applied to all typed in addresses and therefore there may still be GroupWise systems out there with a rule like this: "Change "blah" to "VeryVeryLongDomainNameThatIHateToType". This is so that the user can shorthand Joe@blah.com and have GroupWise properly send – for example.

Flash: We have changed our direction. See latest blog. http://www.novell.com/communities/node/14133/groupwise-windermere-we-listened.

Thank you for continuing to read, provide feedback and ask clarifying questions regarding Windermere. As you should be able to tell, Product Management and Engineering are taking a bigger step forward with Windermere in order to set our product, technology and customers on more sure footing and prepare them for the ever changing landscape ahead. We hope you understand the changes we are making and while there may be some pain associated with these changes for some customers, we certainly believe that all customers will benefit.

As always, please submit your feedback for all to see so that all can benefit.

Dean