Starting Work on the Next Version of MailSaver

MailSaver, my mail archiving utility for GroupWise was released as an open-source add-on for Novell’s GroupWise client for Windows about a year ago. That was the first public release, version 3.0. There were two other full versions, which were not publicly available. Versions before 1.0 waere comman-line tools that only I used. Version 1.x consisted of several versions in VB6 that worked with GroupWise 5.2, and were used within our company. Version 2.x was ported to dot net, for GroupWise 5.2, and it was written to make the migration of our user-base from GroupWise 5.2 to 6.0 easier. It was difficult to port to dot net, and was kind-of buggy. Both versions 1.x and 2.x were standalone programs.

Once we got onto GroupWise 6.0, it was discovered that MailSaver didn’t work right. Version 3.0 was created to work with GroupWise 6.0 and 6.5. After the trouble I’d had with dot net and the GroupWise Object API, I decided to back-port 3.0 to VB6. I also made the program into a plugin for the GroupWise client, so there is no separate interface now. It just works from menus directly from within GroupWise.

Now it’s time to start working on version 4.0. This version will be an evolution from 3.0. It will still be written in VB6, because the GroupWise object API works better in that than in VB.NET. It will still be a plugin in the GroupWise win32 client. It will have several new features though.

• It will work in non-english versions of GroupWise
• It will work in Proxy mode
• It will work on search results folders
• It will remember the last location you saved to for each cabinet folder
• It will remember if it has previously saved a message, allowing incremental saving

Other possible features may include:

• It MAY work with individual messages rather than just folders
• It MAY support saving nested folders
• It MAY support saving messages complete with attachments in a common encapsulated file (I would have to come up with some logical format and also write a viewer for that format)

Time to put my code-monkey hat on.

Fixing the Storage Server Chapter XVIII

Our storage server is flaky. I have blogged about it before. We’ve updated the OS, updated and backdated drivers, updated an HP MSA20 controller card, and tried to replace a cable (but HP sent us the wrong one). Today we got a new HP 6400 storage controller card, which we swapped out and stuck in the server. Hopefully that will do the trick. Only time will tell if the thing is fixed though. It’s usual modus operandi has been to fail in the middle of the night when under heavy load.

Zeta BeOS Just For Fun

I’m an operating system-o-phile. I like to install different stuff on my computers and see what’s out there for different platforms. I use one of Novell’s Linux distributions on my laptop for work, but at home my computer gets a new OS every month or so.

In 1998 or so, Be Inc. showed up on my radar. They made cool multiprocessor PPC-based boxes and had a new OS called BeOS to run on them. They were very cool. In 1999 they got out of the hardware market, and ported BeOS to the Mac and the PC. That year, I bought a new computer, and I bought a copy of BeOS Release 4.5 for i386 to run on it. It was cool and just worked. Of course there were very few apps for it, but it was fun to play with, and I still like the way it does mail, media, and searching. All the recent hullabaloo about desktop searching was already mostly possible in BeOS at least six years ago.

One of the original BeBox computers.

When I used to have a ginormous home stereo, I salvaged an old dual P-166 box and built it in BeOS with a big drive and stood it beside the stereo as an mp3 jukebox. It worked great. We could instantly find any tune with BeOS’s amazing search functionality, and we could just stick on about 1000 tunes with random play and let it go.

That old box has since died, and my music collection has vastly outgrown that old 30 GB hard drive. Now we have about 120 GB of music, hosted on a Linux machine, with web-based and samba access on our home network. We don’t have fast searching anymore, and we’re still working out easy access from thet network. Jenn uses the abysmal Real Player, because it works with her mp3 player. My box has all the mp3s on it, so I just use local access with my jukebox software, rhythmbox. That leaves us with no house-wide system for playing music, and no real easy access method for Jenn to add music either.

Anyways, I like to keep track of BeOS and check out what’s new now and then, and even do an install in our lab for fun just to see what that amazingly fast desktop OS feels like on modern hardware. Be upgraded BeOS to Release 5, and made the basic version free in about 2001, and then went out of business. Palm bought their assets, and has been using Be’s intellectual property to enhance the Palm OS. The free BeOS retained a life of it’s own, and there are still developers working on it and apps for it. A german company called YellowTab (a nod of the head to BeOS’s yellow tab-style title bars on each window) has picked up work on BeOS and are nearing the release of something called Zeta, a successor to the BeOS based on the free version of BeOS R5.

A friend of mine lent me his copy of Zeta Neo so I could try it out in Engineering. At lunch today I did a full install on an old PPro 200, got it working on the Internet, and tried out some of the features. It’s pretty cool, I must say, and I’m reconsidering my home PC’s OS. I may just spring for my own copy and put it on my home machine. Zeta comes with the awseome tracker interface of BeOS R5, enhanced over the past few years, plus Mozilla Firefox, Gobe Productive, which is an MS Office-compatible office suite, and lots of cool media apps. It even comes with CD and DVD burning stuff built in.

Now I just have to figure out where to temporarily stash 120 GB of mp3s so I can install Zeta at home.

Trouble with iFolder and NetStorage

iFolder is Novell’s personal and peer file synchronization service for Windows and Linux. You can declare a folder as an iFolder, and it will then synchronize to your iFolder server and keep the content updated. There is a web-client for it as well so you can access your files away from your computer. Version 3.0, which is in open public beta, will allow you to share your iFolders with other people via email.

NetStorage is a web interface to file systems on NetWare and Linux OES servers. You can hit your server with a web browser and get access to all the same shared storage locations you get when you login with a Novell client.

By default NetStorage shows your iFolders too in the web client view, but we don’t use iFolder, and I want it to not show in NetStorage. Unfortunately Novell’s knowledgebase has an erroneous technical information document (tid) that tells you how to remove iFolder from NetStorage, but doesn’t actually work. Today I have been unsuccessfully trying to remove iFolder from NetStorage on one of our networks. The annoying part about it is that I got iFolder to disappear from NetStorage before in a different server, and the same method doesn’t seem to work on the new serer.

Also, iManager, Novell’s web based server management tool, keeps suddenly deciding I don’t have rights to manage NetStorage, and to fix that I have to stop and kill tomcat and restart it. Argh.

Happy Birthday to Me

I am now officially more than twice the drinking age. That’s what makes it even funnier that I got carded at the Delta Center in Salt Lake City during Brainshare in March.

I got some big “happy birtdhay” hugs from my kids and Jenn this morning, and my mom and dad phoned me, and even my cousin Dan called, and he never calls. Jenn also got me the 40th anniversary Amazing Spider-Man collection on CD from Marvel Comics. I guess I’ll be reading Spider-Man comics every lunch for a while.