UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE COMPUTING SERVICE

Minutes of the 115th Mail and Directory Coordination meeting held on Wednesday, 17th March 2004.

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: 28th April 2004 at 11:15 in C304

1. Hermes and PPSW

31,000 active accounts have now been moved to the new mailstore. 800 accounts have yet to be moved. Most of these are accounts with some kind of user agent configuration problem which needs to be resolved: the individuals concerned have all been contacted in all such cases. The old mailstore is now scheduled to be shut down at the end of September 2004.

Replacement hardware for the Hermes telnet/SSH service has now been ordered. Two old E450 systems have been decommissioned: one of these systems has been donated to unix-support as a replacement Managed Web server system.

A new DNS entry has been created so that we can apply different scanning policies to incoming and outgoing mail which pass through PPSW. MX records which previously pointed at PPSW now point to mx.cam.ac.uk, while ppsw.cam.ac.uk continues to act as the SMTP smarthost for MUAs.

smtp.hermes.cam.ac.uk still points at the old Hermes systems (which has a 4 MByte limit on message size). It will eventually become just another personality of PPSW.

2. Decomissioning IMAP and POP on CUS

811 active IMAP and POP accounts remain on CUS.

3. Email and NATing firewalls

At the moment virus infected machines inside institutions which use network address translating firewalls often cause problems because the infected machine cannot be tracked down from log entries on PPSW. In an ideal world the SMTP proxy on the NAT box would either:

While it is unlikely that such a restriction could be enforced, this will be recommended in future to people setting up new NAT firewalls.

4. Exim development

A small machine has been purchased to support future open source Exim development.

DPC 2004-03-17