Damn it.

6/23/2009 8:37:00 AM

Agreed.

6/23/2009 8:46:30 AM

http://www.cafepress.com/failwise

6/23/2009 10:00:52 AM

Haha, well that's just awesome. I'm actually considering ordering a pack just for the hilarity of the situation.

6/23/2009 10:48:14 AM

They forgot about me during last weekend's migration.

I get the feeling I won't be so lucky next time.

6/23/2009 11:00:05 AM

should have used Notes instead.

6/23/2009 11:00:57 AM

Can someone tell me what this thread is about?

6/23/2009 11:06:47 AM

http://www.ncsu.edu/wolfwise/migrate/groupwise.php

6/23/2009 11:15:49 AM

Pity party!

Drinking game:

Do a shot every time IMAP dies.

6/23/2009 7:51:03 PM

I wouldn't wish that level of alcohol poisoning on anyone.

6/23/2009 7:57:13 PM

i dont mind it at all

yet

6/23/2009 8:23:57 PM

haha, i heard someone call it failwise the other day...

i couldn't think of a more appropriate name.

i think i might order some of those bumper stickers.

6/24/2009 2:01:09 AM

y'all have fun with that.

6/24/2009 6:55:24 PM

^ jerk

6/25/2009 9:40:15 AM

We're being stalked by GroupWise product managers on twitter. Best advice from them so far:

* Upgrade to version 8 as soon as possible
* Read the 300 page manual
* We're just whining because we're not used to it

6/25/2009 10:34:02 PM

when is novell going to do it's rightful death?

6/25/2009 11:15:07 PM

the ONLY thing that failwise does reasonably well is the calendaring system (which is its biggest draw, i know)

everything else is extremely outdated (though i haven't tried failwise 8, yet)...the thing is, though, i've been sharing calendars with people for months using:

- thunderbird
- lightning
- provider for google calendar

and so the only appealing (read: functional) features of failwise are masked by its overwhelming level of suck

6/26/2009 8:46:23 AM

i thought i had requested migration but i guess not

can't log in to my test account either

i put a call into the ABANDON_ALL_HOPE workgroup

meanwhile, i have email and gcal

6/26/2009 10:50:59 AM

Quote :

"We're just whining because we're not used to it"

No we're whining because it's horribly unreliable, poorly designed, and inconvenient. The only good thing about it is the calendar stuff, but if you want to go that route google does it better. I really wish we'd all just migrate to google apps.

Anything that needs a 300 page manual has something wrong with it. There's no need for something to be that complex/poor to need that much documentation.

6/26/2009 5:18:36 PM

Maybe you should be complaining more about the incompetence and mis-management that lead to the state that things are in right now. You want to know why the N&O is complaining about "missing" e-mails related to Mary Easely and Oblinger? The migration to GroupWise is why.

At this point, anyone still using GroupWise in a department on campus ought to be looking for something, anything else. It's no longer a question of IF you're going to lose your mail/calendar data, it's when. The people running the project are grossly incompetent, amateur mail sysadmins. You should be VERY concerned about any migration that, on it's first attempt, goes SO BADLY WRONG that it CORRUPTS the mail system database and screws up service for EVERYONE, not just those being migrated.

6/26/2009 8:24:59 PM

you know... I nintool and I ran an excellent exchange system for 2 departments on campus, but were told we made things too complicated. Funny thing is, the mail on those machines is the only thing that's been safe through this migration.

6/26/2009 9:09:33 PM

That and anything on Cyrus or Gmail. When you have competent people running your mail, you can sleep at night. When you have Bozo the Clown and the Seltzer Pants running your mail, you get what you pay for.

6/26/2009 9:30:10 PM

Oh lookie... still failing...

Quote :

"We are currently experiencing mail delivery issues out of the GroupWise system. Mail between GroupWise post offices and mail destined out to the internet is delivering. Mail headed into the GroupWise system is currently being queued and will be delivered upon service restoration. This is only affecting GroupWise post offices 1-10. We will post as more information is available."

If you go back on SysNews during the past few months, and look for GroupWise/WolfWise-related outages and degradations, it's probably like 10:1 compared to normal Unity (Cyrus) e-mail. And that's BEFORE the transition.

I really don't think people understand how bad this will become over time. The above example is a minor inconvenience, unless you're expecting time-sensitive e-mail. The IMAP mail service on GroupWise has been "overburdened" during this week (their term, not mine)... i.e. down. But they won't call it "down," even if you can't reach it, Mr. User.

The campus needs to move on and get converted to Gmail, and be done with it. And the people running the GroupWise project need to be fired for their incompetence and apparent willingness to outright lie about their system's stability and capabilities.

P.S. Backups? Who needs their e-mail backed up?

6/26/2009 10:40:52 PM

^

6/26/2009 10:59:38 PM

6/26/2009 11:58:38 PM

6/27/2009 12:19:56 AM

You know it was the former chancellor's idea to move this direction. If you need an excuse to revoke tenure there it is. The engineers running GW shouldn't be blamed for doing what they can with what they were given. If they had at least GW8 to work with I don't imagine it would've gone quite so poorly but the administration's pollyanna approach of "Just make it work LOL! " did no one any favors, especially with Oracle expiring in a few days. No amount of genius or talent could make GW7 a better product, and the decision to move to it wasn't made by the people who support it.

6/27/2009 11:10:15 AM

maybe they'll get it all sorted out before everyone abandons it for something else

hey, stranger things have happened

6/27/2009 11:20:12 AM

The people involved with the project were very much a part of the decision to move all of campus over to it, so they very much deserve the criticism and claims of incompetence that folks have lobbed their way.

What amazes me is that the faculty and students of the university are not more outraged by this wasted money. The latest is that more hardware will yet again be needed. No one seems willing to publicly state the obvious, which is that this GroupWise project has turned in to a massive money pit that the only escape from is a total change in direction.

6/27/2009 5:32:50 PM

i don't have the foggiest idea what exactly groupwise is or does, but I am starting to think that every tech decision at ncsu is just an enormous asskissing clusterfuck and has nothing to do with usability or helping students

6/27/2009 6:57:14 PM

[Edited on June 27, 2009 at 7:15 PM. Reason : nm]

6/27/2009 6:59:05 PM

^^ as it turns out, faculty/staff e-mail apparently has nothing to do with helping students.

^^^^^ the engineers running GW should completely be blamed. once the decision was made to use the product, it was their job to implement it correctly, and migrate customers over with a minimum of fuss. they fail on both counts. the screwed-up nature of the decision to use GW permeates the entire project.

6/27/2009 11:45:37 PM

There is no way they could have made GW awesome. :| Are you seriously going to blame worker bees for a decision hamheadedly made by their superiors?

I blame Mike Easley.

Also: How bout that Mac client?

6/28/2009 9:19:43 AM

well, it's still better than the peoplesoft implementation!

and the mypack portal!

oh god OIT is so bad at their jobs

edit: but yes, they kinda had GW dropped on them because the provost or dean or whatever didn't want to change his in-office system, so he forced it on the entire campus :/

[Edited on June 28, 2009 at 9:30 AM. Reason : slashyface]

6/28/2009 9:27:34 AM

Those worker bees were very much in favor of converting to this system and were included in the decision making process. At least a couple of them had been crying for a GroupWise-only campus for years before the Provost made his decision.

I'm not saying "all of OIT." I'm saying the specific people charged with setting up and maintaining GroupWise.

6/28/2009 9:50:56 AM

where's clevow at when you need her

6/28/2009 4:43:00 PM

Quote :

"oh god OIT is so bad at their jobs "

I'm not sure anyone's making that claim. I think a LOT of good people at OIT are going to be associated, by customers, to the fail going on with GroupWise. And that's very sad, because those people (the Help Desk, people running the Cyrus mail system, lists, storage systems) are going to get blamed for things that they had no way to fix or prevent.

6/28/2009 10:57:52 PM

6/29/2009 10:13:45 PM

So unless I'm mistaken, Oracle end of life is tomorrow.

And despite the fact that I was supposed to be a GroupWise early adopter and filled at the form saying "migrate me", I'm still on Cyrus.

Who needs a calendar anyway

6/29/2009 11:04:11 PM

Quote :

"From: Subject: [remedy] Some Remedy notifications were not delivered... again Date: Mon, June 29, 2009 10:36 am To: remedy@lists.ncsu.edu Remedy Users, As a result of this event: http://sysnews.ncsu.edu/news/4a4577e7 a number of email notifications generated by the Remedy system did not reach the intended WolfWise recipient and were returned to the Remedy server as undeliverable. The delivery failures began late Friday evening and continued until around Noon on Sunday. "

#@*%$!

6/30/2009 12:18:38 AM

i'm on groupwise already, but i refuse to use it...i don't really care if anyone can view my calendar (it's open, anyway, if they want to check out the gcal online) and until there's a good reason, i'm going to stick with thunderbird

it doesn't matter anyway, i don't have enough appointments that i NEED a work calendar (be that good or bad)

6/30/2009 7:30:17 AM

Feeling much love for the cyrus folks again tonight as GW has gone down/become unavailable more times in the past 10 days than cyrus ever did since I got here a billion years ago.

6/30/2009 9:41:12 PM

it's not too late to begin forwarding your e-mail to gmail.

use sysnews to set up a forward for your mail, and it'll never even touch failwise.

6/30/2009 10:00:48 PM

How have they managed to corrupt a database yet again ... to the point of knocking the entire cluster offline?

What's the point of clustering if the entire thing goes down this routinely? You could accomplish that level of failure with a single server and save quite a bit of money.

How are they even considering moving *ALL* faculty and staff over to this failed system?

6/30/2009 10:25:35 PM

Who is making decisions for something like this? And why in the bloody fuck are they not looking more seriously into moving to gmail/exchange/any fucking thing else?!

6/30/2009 10:28:36 PM

ultimately the decision rested with the former chancellor, although he wasn't the one that actually decided. he rubber-stamped it. there was a technical committee formed to pit enterprise-wise products against each other, to see which would meet the needs of campus...

so after much debate and bickering, they'd thrown out a bunch of things, including notes, cyrus/oracle calendar, exchange, and some other less-known things.

that left groupwise, which was supposedly the best choice because of "in-house experience." and that's a fair point, there was. but not to run a system on the scale that this ultimately became.

hundreds of thousands of dollars later (possibly into the millions), you have a system now that has whole or part repeatedly failing... some components, like IMAP service (but no one uses that, right?), failing sometimes multiple times per day.

the project was allowed to go too far, and then someone decided that it was too big to fail.

6/30/2009 10:40:15 PM

Outsourcing to GMail (which is what the university is doing for students) is the most appropriate thing to do at this point.

6/30/2009 11:05:01 PM

^ as has been mentioned in various other threads, there is an issue regarding employee email (as in, those who are employed by state government) on an outsourced service like gmail

7/1/2009 8:50:19 AM

^ as has been mentioned in various other threads, there is an issue regarding employee email (as in, those who are employed by state government) on an outsourced service like gmail

7/1/2009 8:51:20 AM

WE HEARD YOU THE FIRST TIME

SUSPEND

7/1/2009 9:00:57 AM