Looking for GW on NT server users -Reply

[David Couche]

I've just read this message - I'm a bit behind with my list reading!

I'd just like to say this is not my experience at all. I've been running a test NT 4 SP3 server for around 12 months. It has a GW 5.2.4 primary domain on it, along with a post office (admittedly, only 3 test users) and is running the MTA, ADA and POA. It is the primary domain for our entire system. All users (860) except the 3 guinea pigs are still on GW 4.1, which is a secondary domain. The server's primary role is to run the GWIA, which is the gateway for our entire system (both domains).

In these roles, it is processing around 2000 messages a day. Most are transferred between the GWIA and the secondary domain via the MTA (the secondary domain is on a different, production NT server), though several hundred messages a day are for the test GW 5 post office.

The server is an antique Compaq Prosignia 300, which is a Pentium 120, with only 64Mb of memory. The server is rock solid! It has not been reset for more than 6 months. The MTA and ADA just work! The POA usually reports user timeout errors but this doesn't affect operation. The GWIA suffers from the well-known bug where it reports 450 MX Lookup failure for all outgoing messages after it has been running for around 4 days - I simply restart it and everything else is unaffected.

I'm hoping to start migrating all our users to GW 5.5 in the next few months (running on a bigger server than the test one). I'll find out then how it goes with more users.

The single biggest headache I have had in my entire GW 5 experience is the integration with Netware. I would love to see Novell release a non-NDS version for users of other network operating systems.

David.

>>> "Joe Acquisto" <ACQUISTJ at lan.newpaltz.edu> 11/02/99 22:50:48 >>>
Allow me to point out that many, many products seem to suffer similar 'bugs' on NT. 

>From the beginning of my (slight) experience with NT, NT apps would stop working, while the NT box appeared to be working.  The mouse would move, Freecell would work, the app would pop up, but data would not be processed. 

This seemed to be independent of the vendor.  Just run them a while (variable) and the would stop.  

Proxy server, News feeds, automated radio stations, no matter.  They were so happy they converted from Netware, to avoid those pesky occasional "ABEND" problems. 

Yeah, much better to have to restart NT every few days instead.  Much more High Tech. 

joea/ 

<<< David Reagan <dreagan at commanche.swmed.edu>    2/10  4:59p >>> 

Be afraid, be very afraid. :^) 

Our NT experiences with the NT agents has been awful. They crash at random, (Yes, even more so than their NLM counterparts.), and the support via Novell has been poor. I wish I could tell you some cool perfomance tricks for NT, but we never got that far. The only NT agent we have left is our 5.5.1 Webaccess agent and it has died three times in the past two days with various app errors. We only run it still because of the better IIS performance when using SSL. 

Again, Novell's support (at the premium level) has been poor to non-existent with regard to their NT agents. It's sad when I have to explain to the Novell tech that they even have a NT version of their agents. :^( 

I wish you better luck that we had... 

David Reagan, CNE Network Analyst UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas dreagan at commanche.swmed.edu 





Matthew Weisberg wrote: >  > I am trying to track down any tuning and performance tips for running GroupWise agents and message stores on NT and NTFS.  Is anyone running significant size GroupWise systems on NT server?  If so, can you please provide information on your environment?  I am also looking for NT parameter/setting changes to enhance GroupWise performance on NT as well.  Looking for good or bad experiences.  Thanks!!! >  > ------- > Matt Weisberg > matt at weisberg.net > http://www.weisberg.net