Chapter 32. Creating a Highly Available GroupWise Internet Agent Solution

Imagine the number of emails going through your GWIA every day, incoming and outgoing. Depending on the size of your organization, this could easily be hundreds of thousands. But even with smaller numbers, consider this: Wouldn't your users be horrified if even a single mail message were "supposedly" lost? So even in smaller environments you will probably be interested to learn about a few techniques to make your Internet SMTP communication more redundant.

This chapter covers high availability of the GWIA from the perspective of what you can do with GroupWise itself; it does not discuss platform-related high-availability techniques such as NetWare, Linux, or Windows clustering, which is at a more OS-related level. Nor does this chapter discuss additional products you could use to strengthen your SMTP stream, between your GWIA and the Internet. We're trying to go to the max with GroupWise itself and we'll see where this brings us.

In this chapter, we propose to disable all the services on your GWIA that you don't really need. Then we dive a lot deeper into the wonderful world of DNS with its A, MX, and PTR records. The logical follow-up is to cover how you can make the incoming SMTP stream more robust, and the next section discusses some new GroupWise 7 options to add mor e redundancy to the outgoing SMTP stream.