Question : Moving Groupwise 5.5 from old hardware to new hardware

Old hardware.
Netware SBS 5.0 sp6 w Groupwise 5.5 sp5

New hardware
Same Netware.  Same Groupwise.

How do we get the email messages, calendars, and address book from the old system to the new, as quickly as possible?

Do we move post offices?

Do we create the new server in the same tree/context/server name and simply reinstall the OS, Groupwise, move the po and domain info over and reinstall the agents followed by tricky grafting?

The TIDs I've come across leave a lot to be desired, unfortunately.

TIA
Luke

Answer : Moving Groupwise 5.5 from old hardware to new hardware

Yes, using XCOPY to a platform like Windoze, which has file permissions that are a crude subset of those in NetWare, will destroy information like file ownerships and permissions. However, such destruction is impossible to avoid in any case, since you are moving from one tree to another - the uderlying account information (specifically, Object IDs) has changed even if the names remain the same (.Joe.Some.Company.Tree1 is not the same as .Joe.Some.Company.Tree2).

However, it shouldn't matter, as the GroupWise NLMs run as "root" (to borrow a *NIX term) on the servers. Thus they don't really care about ownership of the files.

The only time the ownership comes into play, as I recall, is if you're using Direct Connect mode for the clients (which you really shouldn't be using) instead of Client/Server mode. Direct Connect mode is a holdover from GroupWise v4.x (and earlier) days where the GroupWise client directly accessed and manipulated the GroupWise system files. Inevitably, this led to database corruption and comcommitant system stability issues. Starting in GroupWise v5.0, Client/Server mode was introduced, where the GroupWise client talks over an IP connection (TCP:1677) to the GroupWise NLM, and the GroupWise NLM handles accessing and manipulating the GroupWise system files.

Client/Server mode eliminated the problem you're seeing now (820C errors) as well as giving the admin a generally more stable and reliable environment. Apparently, some 5 or 6 years after it was introduced, you're still not using it, for reasons I can only imagine. Step 0, before migration, is to get your GroupWise clients on Client/Server mode, using a DNS name for the server. Then when you move the files, ownership won't matter, and re-directing the clients is merely a matter of changing a DNS entry.