Notable MTA Commands and Switches

There are several console command-line options that offer functionality that is not documented in the GroupWise MTA interface.

These are the commands and switches:

• F4 or Ctrl+D keystrokes: These keystrokes execute an immediate eDirectory user synchronization operation. If you use these keystrokes while MTA is running, you will be presented with a confirmation prompt.

• /TCPINBOUND-X: The default number of inbound connections that the MTA can have is 40. With the TCPINBOUND switch, you can increase this setting. One customer of ours with a very busy MTA has this setting set to 150. An MTA that has been configured to communicate with a lot of other MTAs, or an MTA that communicates with other MTAs over a slow WAN link, is most likely to need this setting increased beyond the default of 40, which is just hard-coded in the MTA.

• /TCPWAITDATA-X: This setting is for the default time in seconds that an MTA will wait for data transmission from an established connection with another MTA. The hard-coded default for this setting is 20 seconds. An MTA that has been configured to communicate with other MTAs over a slow WAN link is most likely to need this setting increased beyond the default of 20 seconds.

• /TCPWAITCONNECT-X: The MTA attempts a connection four times consecutively. If it fails all four times, it reports an error, and then waits for 10 minutes before it tries again. During each attempt, the MTA will pass the /tcpwaitconnect value (or the default of 5 seconds if no value was provided) to the TCP/IP stack. This is how long each attempt will try to establish the connection. Therefore, if the /tcpwaitconnect switch is set to 10 seconds, the MTA will attempt the connection four times in a row, each time instructing the TCP/IP stack to wait for 10 seconds before timing out. If all four attempts fail, an error is reported. This means that in this setting, it would be as much as 40 seconds before the MTA reported that it was unable to successfully connect to another MTA. It will then wait for 10 minutes before it tries again. It will do this indefinitely.

• /TCPTRUNKWIDTH-X: By default, a GroupWise MTA can open only four connections to another MTA. Each connection is used to send a message file with. If you were to increase this setting to 10, for example, and if a GroupWise MTA suddenly has 10 messages to send to another MTA, it might open 10 connections to that MTA.

The /TCP... switches are fine-tuning features that you are most likely to use in larger GroupWise systems.