While GWAVA 4 on NetWare is still on beta, some clients would like to take advantage of the tremendous power of GWAVA 4 today.

GWAVA 4 is available NOW for Linux and as a GWAVA customer, you're entitled to it if your maintenance is up to date.

This is also a great way to simply test drive GWAVA 4.

We will be taking advantage of GWAVA 4's new GWIA scanning ability to do this. Scanning at the GWIA has a lot of advantages for Internet mail. For scanning between post offices, you will still need to use GWAVA's traditional MTA interface.

So let's begin.

Start by setting up a Linux box. It doesn't have to be anything special. I would recommend using SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10. (SLES 10). It's easy to set up and very reliable.

This SLES 10 box should have a static IP and then install GWIA for Linux on it. You're already licensed for it if you have GroupWise.

In ConsoleOne on your NetWare system, add a new GWIA - this will be the one on your Linux box. With GroupWise 7, the transition is even easier.

GroupWise 7 allows you to have many GWIAs arranged in a priority so they act like "secondary" or "backup" GWIAs in case the main one is unavailable.

Bring the GWIA online on the Linux side and send a message to it. It should arrive in your mailbox safely. Next, bring down the GWIA on your NetWare box - only for this test. Send a message out. It should go out via your secondary (Linux) GWIA.

Great! Now you can put your NetWare GWIA back on line while we do the rest.

Once your GWIA is running well on your SLES 10 box, you have one more step - configuring a secondary MX record OR pointing the incoming SMTP stream to the Linux box.

Once your Linux box is successfully receiving and sending mail, you can bring down your NetWare GWIA and we can continue on to installing GWAVA 4.

Note that your GWAVA 3 is still protecting you while you're doing this. If at any time you want to roll back, just bring up the NetWare GWIA and repoint your incoming SMTP stream to the NetWare box. So you're safe.

Installing GWAVA 4 is simplicity itself.

1) Get the package from www.gwava.com.
2) Unzip it to a directory on the Linux box.
3) Open up a terminal session (like a DOS or Console prompt).
4) Navigate to the directory where you unzipped the install files.
5) Run the menu script.
6) Follow the prompt in the menu.

That's it. You've installed it! Next step, configure it. Everything from now on is done by the web.

In your browser, navigate to:

http://:49282

And follow the prompts.

Now you will configure a GWIA based scanner. In the Server/Scanner management, run the wizard to install/create a new scanner.

You will need to know your GWIA's paths. The prompts will give you suggestions that point to the most common configurations.

Restart GWAVA when you're done. Or better yet, reboot your Linux box. It isn't strictly necessary but it's easy. In actuality, you only need to restart your GWIA and GWAVA.

Now you're ready to configure your scanner.

To ensure everything's working, do check "Scanner Information" regularly. It will tell you whether GWIA and GWAVA are really talking to each other.

Also, on the admin home page, you'll see statistics on how many messages GWAVA has processed. It's front-and-center to you.

Check out the Antispam configuraton, particularly - notice the "auto-learn". This is one of the most powerful advances in GWAVA yet.

Under Non-spam auto-learn, you can set up watermarks which will train up the antispam system automatically.

Basically, you're up and running now and you can try GWAVA 4 yourself this way. Once you're comfortable, try switching GWAVA 3 into bypass mode (CTRL+B at the GWAVA console) and see what GWAVA 4 gives you by itself.

I'd like to mention one more thing here. In GWAVA 3, we relied heavily on Exceptions - white lists - which passed messages based only on the "From" address. You won't really be doing a lot of that in GWAVA 4 because watermarks are so much better.

Watermarks are like white lists but because they positively identify good mail based on more than just the "From" address, they can be used to feed good mail into the antispam engine to reduce and in some cases eliminate false positives.

With GWAVA 4, you don't need to "optimize" or do any of the maintenance functions that were common in GWAVA 3 -- the auto-learn is your friend.

One other thing I do is to use SURBL as a SPAM auto-learn source. Between this and the watermarks, the antispam engine learns quickly what your legitimate mail looks like and you will enjoy amazingly accurate spam filtering.

Enjoy!

Willem