Best Practices

As always, there are a few things you can do ahead of time that will make your life (and your troubleshooting efforts) easier down the road:

• Make sure that log files on your GroupWise agents can grow large enough and long enough to give you the diagnostic information you need when you need it.

• Look for message files in queue directories. The mail message queue directories under a post office are the following:

  • PO\WPCSOUT\OFS\0-7: Incoming messages to the post office.

  • PO\WPCSIN\0-7: Outgoing messages from the post office.

  The mail message queue directories under a domain are the following:

  • DOMAIN\WPCSIN\0-7: These are incoming messages to the domain. These files are placed into the WPCSIN\0-7 directory if another domain has UNC connectivity to this domain.

  • DOMAIN\MSLOCAL\GWINPROG\0-7: When a mail message is incoming to the MTA, it is initially created in these directories.

  • DOMAIN\MSLOCAL\MSHOLD\XXXXXXXX\0-7: These are outgoing messages from the domain. Wherever a mail messages goes to a PO, to another domain, or to a gateway in this domain, it is first routed to the DOMAIN\MSLOCAL\MSHOLD\XXXXXXXX\0-7 directory. The XXXXXXXX value corresponds with the FID of the object whose outgoing queue this represents.

    Tip

    In each of the DOMAIN\MSLOCAL\MSHOLD\XXXXXXXX directories, there is a text file called MTANAME. If you open this file with any text editor, it will give you the full name of the domain or post office that this hold queue represents.

    
    

  • DOMAIN\WPGATE\gateway name\WPCSOUT\GATEWAY-FID\0-7: When an MTA has a message to give a gateway, it puts the message in this directory.

  • DOMAIN\WPGATE\GATEWAY\WPCSIN\0-7: When a gateway has something to give the MTA, it puts the file in this directory.

• If you use Windows Explorer to look at file queues, make sure that Explorer is configured to give you the most accurate information. Otherwise, you might not notice that a file in a particular queue is very large. Make sure that Windows Explorer is configured to do the following:

  • Show all files

  • Sort all files according to size

  • Show the details for files (so that you can actually see the file size)

• Use the agent's HTTP monitoring interface to help troubleshoot message flow problems. The GroupWise agents HTTP interface allows you to very quickly and easily determine whether and where you are having link configuration problems. You can track the links through your system, and easily see whether there are any messages queued up in any of an agent's hold queues.

  One other tip is that if you have message logging enabled on the MTA and you see messages sitting in an MSLOCAL\MSHOLD\XXXXXXXX directory, you can actually click the messages. You can then determine who the sender of the message is.