GroupWise 2012 Upgrade

Novell announced the release of GroupWise 2012, Tuesday January 25 2012.  So being a GroupWise devoted admin/user I made plans for a weekend upgrade of my mail system. So Saturday morning I took a deep breath and started my upgrade. A note here that upgrades of the GroupWise back end normally are pretty painless, but you always have to watchout for Murphy.   So the first step was to make two backups of my GroupWise system, the first was with a custom backup script that backup my post offices using dbcopy and allows the backup to be donewhile the system is on line.  The second backup was to shutdown the system and copy all the folders to my backup NAS. While the backup was running I read through the documentation on upgrading to see if there were any gotcha”s that that would ruin my day. The only major change that could cause problems is the upgrade in the webaccess.. The new install removes the gwinter agent and replaces post office access with soap. What you lose is document publising of document in  the GroupWise document management system, these documents can still be downloaded, just not viewed on line.  The document management system in GroupWise is being replaced by Novell Vibe, Novell”s collaboration solution.\r\n\r\nThe upgrade itself was extremely fast. The upgrade removed the gwinter agent from the system. The agents ugrade  only took a few minutes.\r\n

The items updated
• Admin Tools & Software directory
• Schema update
• Domain & Post office agent
• Gwia

After the update was complete, I had to start the MTA first to update the Domain database with the new schema.  This only took a few minutes on my domain. Next was to start the post office and allow the schema to update, this took a a while longer  then the domain. The I started up the GWIA and checked the system to see if mail would flow, after sending an email from an outside account, and not receiving any email I check the mail path. The first was my GWAVA and that had be restarted, with no mail showing in the GWIA console, I checked my Firewall which is a SMTP proxy. I found the missing mail in the smtp queue. After releasing it from the queue and receiving the mail, I send outbound mail and found that working. I shutdown GroupWise and restarted it through the normal startup.\r\n\r\nThe web access component in a new installation that use the soap protocol for communication between itself and the post office. a restart of the apache server and tomcat are required.

The start up commands for displaying the Consoles
• MTA Start Command ./gwmta –show @domain.mta &
• POA Start Command ./gwpoa –show @po.poa &
• GWIA Start Command ./gwia –show @gwia.cfg &

Normal Statup commands
• GWAVA normal startup Command rcgwavaman start
• GroupWise normal startup Command rcgrpwise start

Apache and tomcat restat commands\r\n
• Apache restart Command rcapache2 restart
• Tomcat restart Command rcnovell-tomcat5 restart

This installation is in on a Novell OES2 system.