Minutes of the 134th Mail and Directory Coordination meeting held on Wednesday, 26th July 2006.

Date of next meeting: 20th September 2006 at 11:15 in C304.

1) Hermes and PPSW

4 additional Cyrus servers (each with 16 x 300 GByte disk) and three additional PPSW systems have been purchased and installed into racks. There appears to be an nasty incompatibility between the motherboard and RAID controllers in the Cyrus systems which causes data in the battery backed write cache to be lost on power failure. The supplier is replacing the RAID controllers with a different model which does not have this problem. Two machines installed last year (which originally worked without problems) have developed the same fault after a motherboard swap at Christmas. We are currently moving email off onto a machine with the new RAID controllers.

2) Mailman

There are currently 250 Mailman lists. Documentation is almost complete. A small outstanding issue is that messages distributed by Mailman have a different return path address to the existing @lists system. Several dozen people on Hermes have Sieve filters to sort @lists email based on return path: this would cause some confusion if the return addresses changed gradually as lists were migrated to Mailman. We plan to change the return path address used by the old @lists system on a given date after an announcement and to fix up Sieve files on Hermes at the same point.

3) Insecure access to Hermes

84% of the people with insecure settings have either fixed their configuration or left the University: 1613 remain. The reconfiguration exercise and associated nagging has caused a number of people with only tenuous connections left to the University to ask for their Hermes accounts to be shut down.

4) Collateral Spam from MTAs on the CUDN

MISD have made improvements to their firewall and Exchange system to reject email which would immediately generate a bounce if accepted. The documentation for minimum requirements for MTAs attached to the CUDN still needs to be updated.

5) Phymail

The mail store for phy.cam.ac.uk died on 14th June. Emergency redirection was set up to redirect @phy email to Hermes in the case that the @phy address was a CRSid which corresponded to a Hermes account. After a few days central IT support in Physics decided to move all of the remaining users to Hermes, creating new accounts as needed. FANF is now removing the redirection apparatus so that phy.cam.ac.uk will end up as a normal managed mail domain.

6) Alumni email for the Judge Business School

JBS have asked for a managed mail domain alumni.jbs.cam.ac.uk to act as a forwarding service which their Alumni can advertise. They are particularly keen that a domain within jbs.cam.ac.uk is used to emphasise the connection to the department. The MDCM discussed the issues in order to draw up a set of recommendations that could be taken to the SMT and IT Syndicate.