News!! As of today 4/10/00 Gordano has said they will change this, see the note at the bottom.
Ntmail 5 brings some much needed and appreciated features however it also brings one big glaring problem.
It seems that Gordano (maker of NTmail) decided to key their copy protection mechanism to a disk ID. If the disk ID changes, the program refuses to run and puts up an error about an invalid key. So what can cause a disk id to change you ask?
Here is what happened to me the other day. I have a fairly large mail server, every night I run backup to tape and I rotate a set of 15 tapes. Good and safe, or so I thought. Then I blew out a disk drive, just happened to be the drive NTmail was on. Ok no problem, stick in a new drive, restore from tape and in 20 minutes I'm ready to rock. Reboot the server and everything works except NTmail aborts with an error about my key being invalid??
As it turns out, this is caused by NTmail's copy protection features (are these really features?). So beat my head on the machine for a little while then headed over to the NTmail support list to find out what was going on. What I was told is this isn't how you restore NTmail from a tape backup. Here is the restore procedure I had to use.
1) restore the machine from tape
2) rename the ntmail directory to ntmailbackup
3) delete the ntmail registry entries, under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE look for \Gordano and \InternetShopper keys and delete them.
4) reboot
5) Download and install a fresh copy of NTmail to \ntmail (I had to download because in this day an age who keeps a copy handy, right?)
6) stop the new ntmail services (the install starts them)
7) copy setup.txt (assuming you have been having NTmail save this file plus the additional settings each night) from the \ntmailbackup\bin directory to the \ntmail\bin directory .
8) run mail -yrz to reimport all the registry settings and user settings.
9) copy all the mailbox files back into place. If you have one domain this is easy, just copy the \users directory from \ntmailbackup\yourdomain to \ntmail\yourdomain. If you are like me and have 300 domains on the server it's a bit more complex and can take a little time (like 4 1/2 hours and there wasn't enough space on the disk for two copies so I had to do moves instead of copy). In fact you might call it a ROYAL PAIN IN THE ASS. Also, make sure the NTmail services are NOT running while you are doing this or you overwrite all incoming mail. So your server is down hard for this whole procedure.
10) Smear lambs blood along the sides of your monitor, put on your garlic necklace, rub your lucky rabbit's foot, mumble something in Latin (how do you say "this sucks" in Latin?) and reboot.
With a little luck your mail server will come back up and run, congratulations, you have just done in 5 hours what should have taken 20 minutes.
Other things to consider. Since NTmail is keying on a disk ID (Gordano has not told us yet what exactly a disk ID is) this can affect other things. For example I've no idea what happens if you are running a raid 5 array and blow out a disk or if you are using Windows 2000 and have NTmail on a reparse point mounted drive (mounting a drive as a directory in an existing disk structure is one of the new features, something Unix has had for years). Oh, and if you are running a mirror set and blow out the main drive so you break the mirror and reboot, NTmail fails and you have to go thru the above procedure to recover it.
I've found this whole thing rather distasteful, but I'm just one guy and Gordano doesn't particularly like me anyway... so it's unlikely they will change this just because I bitched. But at least now I feel better.
Geo.
I received this today!! Fantastic news, Gordano needs to be commended for listening to their customers on this one.
----- Original Message -----
From: "John Stanners" <john.stanners@gordano.com>
To: <discuss@ntmail.co.uk>
Sent: Monday, April 10, 2000 5:39 AM
Subject: RE: [NTMail] NTmail5 & backups
> While we would still recommend that our own recovery method is followed
> using a restoration of setup.txt, we have taken into account all the input
> from customers on this matter and from the next release there will no
> longer be a tie to the disk ID. This means that if you have to change a
> disk for whatever reason you will be able to restore from tape and NTMail
> should run without problems.
>
> John
>