| Present: | P. Hazel, D.P. Carter R.J. Dowling, F.A.N. Finch, C.J. Jardine K.M. Jeary, B.K. Omotani, P. Stewart, R. Stratford, C.E. Thompson, J.M. Wilkins |
Date of next meeting: 4th February 2004 at 11:15 in C304
14,500 accounts have been moved to the new Hermes mailstore (17,000 remain to be moved). Power and networking is currently being arranged for the second batch of Cyrus servers.
The CUS to Hermes migration tool is almost ready for testing. A short Techlinks seminar and Helpdesk training will be given at the start of next term. Active CUS users will be moved to the new mailstore as soon as the migration tool is available. IMAP access to CUS for new users was disabled on 27th November (backdated for all user accounts created since 1st October).
A number of new applications (e.g: CamCORS) rely on working @cam mail addresses. At the same time a large number of people (in particular students on one year courses) come to the University with an existing email account and no real desire or need to use a mailstore in Cambridge. The traditional solution to this problem has been to set up Hermes accounts and tell the people concerned to set up forwarding using the Webmail interface. This solution isn't ideal given the need to distribute Hermes specific passwords which will only be used a single time.
At the moment @cam redirections are limited to a fixed number of trusted systems within Cambridge. It is proposed that this should be replaced with arbitrary @cam forwarding, authenticated using a Raven password and a challenge response test message to verify the proposed target address. The opposite approach (merging @cam forwarding into @hermes forwarding) was considered but not favoured because of the need for Hermes specific passwords.
A concern which was raised was the close coupling between the @cam and @hermes mail domains. Ideally an update to @cam forwarding should be mirrored on Hermes where a Hermes account exists, but this may not be possible given the profusion of systems involved. There are also Data Protection Act concerns with the offsite email addresses associated with CRSids.
The MDCM concluded that work should continue on liberal @cam forwarding, but that the Techlinks should be consulted to see if any further issues are raised.
DPC 2003-12-18