Monitoring GroupWise WebAccess Through a Web Browser


This section discusses the options for monitoring your WebAccess system through any standard PC-based web browser. It discusses how to monitor both the WebAccess Agent and the WebAccess Application.

Monitoring the Agent from a Web Browser

To have this functionality, the WebAccess Agent must be enabled to allow HTTP monitoring. This can be done during the install, with startup switches, or by modifying the WebAccess Agent object from ConsoleOne (which is our preference).

After you have the HTTP monitoring enabled for a WebAccess Agent, you can browse to the agent using a web browser and the following syntax:

http://server IP or DNS address:http port

Here's an example: http://groupwise.wwwidgets.com:7211.

You will be prompted with the HTTP username and password that you configured for the GroupWise WebAccess Agent. Figure 11.19 shows a WebAccess Agent that is being monitored from a web browser.

Figure 11.19. Monitoring GroupWise WebAccess through a web browser


Here's an explanation of some of the information shown in Figure 11.19:

  • Status: The status page shows you the current status of the WebAccess Agent. Here you can get a good idea of how the WebAccess Agent is performing. Notice under the Statistics section that you can view how much memory the server has, as well as the current processor utilization of the server.

    Note

    If the agent is running on a Windows 2000/2003 server, you do not get the processor utilization reading.


  • Configuration: The configuration tab shows you the current configuration of the WebAccess Agent. This is helpful if you need to check how the WebAccess Agent is configured. You can quickly check all configuration settings here.

  • Environment: The Environment tab shows you different options depending on which platform your agent is running onNetWare versus Windows. The NetWare Environment tab shows you the following information as regards the server configuration:

    Server

    WWWFS1

    Company

    Novell

    O.S. Revision

    NetWare 5.60.02

    O.S. Date

    July 10, 2002

    Memory

    614015

    Processor utilization

    5%

    Supported connections

    31

    Connections in use

    1

    Clib version

    5.6

    Receive buffer max

    5000


    It also shows all loaded modules on the NetWare server.

  • Log Files: The Log Files tab allows you to view the contents of the WebAccess log files. You will see a list of all agent log files. You can highlight any one and select View Log to see the entire contents of that particular log file. If disk logging is not enabled, you cannot view any logs, because there aren't any.

This section covered how to configure HTTP monitoring of the GroupWise WebAccess Agent. The next section explains how to configure HTTP monitoring of the WebAccess Application.

Monitoring the Application from a Web Browser

By default, the Application does not have HTTP monitoring enabled, so you must manually enable this service. This is accomplished by performing the following steps:

1.

Edit the WEBACC.CFG file. On a NetWare server this file is typically found in the SYS:\NOVELL\WEBACCESS directory. On a Linux server, this file is typically found at /opt/novell/groupwise/webaccess. Be sure to keep the case of the file lowercase on the Linux platform.

Note

You might see several WEBACC.CFG.X files in this directory as well. These are backup copies of the WEBACC.CFG file. You are interested in the WEBACC.CFG file, because this is the file that the Application reads for its configuration information.

2.

Identify the following section of this file:

#Application Administration Tool # Invoked on the URL # (e.g. http://<server>/gw/webacc?action=Admin.Open) ######################################################### Admin.WebConsole.enable=false Admin.WebConsole.username=admin Admin.WebConsole.password=admin

3.

Change the line that reads

Admin.WebConsole.enable=false

to this:

Admin.WebConsole.enable=true.

4.

Change the username from admin to a username of your choosing in the Admin. WebConsole.username= field. This is not an eDirectory or a GroupWise user ID, and it is strictly used for monitoring the WebAccess Application.

5.

Change the password from admin to a unique password in the Admin.WebConsole.password= field. This password should be very secure. Make it at least eight characters long, and include numbers, punctuation marks, and letters. The reason for using such a hard-to-guess password is that there is no intruder detection here, and anyone can access the /gw/webacc page of your WebAccess system if they guess the username and password. So in the interest of security, change the default user and password values from admin to something you are comfortable with.

6.

Shut down the WebAccess Application and restart it.

Tip

If you are running the Application on NetWare 6 or newer with the Tomcat33 or Tomcat4 servlet engine, you can simply issue the following commands on the NetWare server console:

java killall java exit tomcat33 or Tomcat4

This will shut down just the servlet engine and then restart it.

On the Linux platform the command will typically be this:

/var/opt/novell/tomcat4/bin/catalina.sh stop /var/opt/novell/tomcat4/bin/catalina.sh start

7.

Now you are ready to access the HTTP interface of your Application. You do this by using the following URL:

http://gw/webacc?action=Admin.Open

Notice that all you need to do is access the sign-in page of your WebAccess server, which places you at yourserversDNSName/gw/webacc. You then add ?action=Admin.Open to the end of your URL.

8.

You are then prompted for the username and password that you defined in the WEBACC.CFG file in steps 4 and 5. Enter this information, and you will then access the HTTP monitoring of the WebAccess Application. Figure 11.20 shows what you might see.

Figure 11.20. Monitoring GroupWise WebAccess Application through a web browser


Here's an explanation of some of the information shown in Figure 11.20:

  • Status: The status page will display information about all users who have logged into WebAccess from this particular Application. You can see the date and time that the user logged in, as well as the last time the user communicated with the Application. This can be helpful to identify users who use WebAccess the most, and stay connected for long periods. You can also see the client IP address of the user's browser, the user's UserID.PostOffice.Domain, and the WebAccess Agent version that is currently servicing this user. You can also see which browser the user is using to access WebAccess. This can be great to identify users who are using PDAs or WAP devices. It can also be used to identify any new browsers. You can also sort on any of these columns. This is great if you want to see all the users who are accessing a particular agent, or to see who has logged in the most.

    If you click on a user who is logged in, you will be taken to a page that will display detailed information about this user. You can see which templates the user is using, the language the user is running in, as well as the list of WebAccess Agents that the Application can fail over to for this particular user. You can easily see exactly which agent the user is currently talking to, and which agent the user will fail over to in case the current agent has a problem. The * in the Using column indicates which Agent the user is currently communicating with. Figure 11.21 shows an example of this.

    Figure 11.21. Viewing a user through the WebAccess Application monitor


  • Configuration: The Configuration tab displays information about the version of Application you are running, and how the Application is currently configured. You get Java vendor information on your Java servlet as well. You can also view all the Application's configuration files in a read-only mode. This is great if you need to quickly see how something is configured.

  • Log Files: The Log Files link allows you to view the logs of the WebAccess Application. This is very useful to see which agents the Application could not communicate with, or other errors that occurred at the Application.

There you have it; you now have several excellent tools to monitor the current state of your WebAccess system.



NOVELL GroupWise 7 Administrator Solutions Guide
Novell GroupWise 7 Administrator Solutions Guide
ISBN: 0672327880
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 320
Authors: Tay Kratzer

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