[BESGW]

Our organisation went live with BES for GroupWise last week. The first few days went really well, but since last wednesday our GroupWIse email server started freezing.. sometime twice a day.

Our POA and MTA are running on a Windows 2000 server with the lastest service pack. I checked the log files on both the BES and the GW server (MTA and POA logs as well...), but nothing points to what is the problem.. Spend a few hours on the phone with BlackBerry and Rogers (our carrier) and they seem to be as clueless as we are! Anyone experienced problems similar to ours??

[mgendell]

The last I heard, BES for GroupWise is supported only with the NetWare/NLM-based version of GroupWise. I've heard rumors that others have gotten it to work with the Windows vesion of GroupWise, but kudos to BlackBerry for working with you when it's not running in an officially supported platform!

Is the entire server locking up, or just the MTA process? What logging level are you using on GW and BES? Both can be set to "debug" level which might provide a better idea about what's happening.

Before you start digging through reams of logs though, have you done any database maintenance on the GW system? At a minimum, validate the domain and post office databases.

The other thing to try is to shut down BES for a while to see if the GW server still has problems. My understanding is that the BES server appears to GroupWise as just another GroupWise client. So if there's a problem on the GW server it may be just a coincidence that it started a few days after BES went live.

[bfrye]

We're running the w2k advanced server for our post offices and MTA and have had no problems like you speak of, even during the beta period. Ours has been up and going since last November and haven't seen any problems at all on the post office/MTA side.

I would recheck that your PO and MTA SP4 patches are up to date. Also make sure you are running the latest client version on your BES server.

You could also try turning off various PIM features such as address book, memos, tasks, appointments, etc... and running it barebones for just email and see if that fixes the problem. If it does, re-enable the services one at a time to see if any of them will crash it. It will at least give you a starting point to work from, or allow email until the problem is found and resolved.

I don't know that this would help, but you could try re-installing the BES server. The database won't be touched, so the users you already have activated will just notice an outage, but won't have to re-activate when the server is brought back up.

It could also be possible that a single user is causing the problem. If you set the mdglobalconnector (I think that's what it was called) threads on BES to one, you can monitor it and see if it is crashing the post office on the same user everytime or if it's random. If it is a single user, you could disable that user and see if it still crashes. Re-activating the user, or running gwcheck on their groupwise account might fix it.

[BESGW]

Thanks for your help on this! We will update our patch level to SP4 this weekend, and see if that improve things. If it doesn't, then I'll proceed with what you also suggested I try.. One quick question: I can't find the mdglobalconnector you're refering to...

[bfrye]

Are you using SQL or MSDE?

I'll take a look later and find the actual name of it. But might be mdglobalsomething.

[BESGW]

Using MSDE.

[bfrye]

Using the DBAMGR2K or whatever it's called.

expand BESMgmt and click on tables.

Open up MbConnectorGlobals. (show all rows)

Scroll to MaxThreads.

You can change it to 1, save and restart the controller.

Then monitor your GWCO log to see if if when the MDA crashes it's on the same user or different users. This will at least let you rule out if it's random users crashing or a single user.

Don't forget to change it back to 10 when you're done.