UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
COMPUTING SERVICE
Present: B. Landy, D.P. Carter, P. Hazel, K.M. Jeary, B.K. Omotani, S. Page,
A.A. Schneider, P. Stewart, A.J.M. Stoneley, R. Stratford, C.E. Thompson
Date of next meeting: Wednesday 13th March at 11:15 in Au310
A beta version was released to Techlinks in November. Feedback was minimal,
with the exception of a useful discussion with Espen Koht. Currently there are
around 200 active users, with around 100 logins per day. A second generation
user interface, based on feedback from Vince and Espen, has been implemented.
The primary difference is the use of a common toolbar across screens. This will
be released as a more general pilot shortly, initially without help text.
The "ex-directory" opt out has now been incorporated into the finger search on
Hermes and CUS, although not quite in the manner reported in MDCM_98. In
addition remote use of finger @systemname has been disabled on both systems.
This has been implemented. There were some cases involving hosts in the RSS in
the first few weeks but there have been no recent cases. A additional manual
block on verify@pisem.net was added, behaviour suggested it was an automated
tool for verifying large lists of e-mail addresses and it was felt that the
purpose of such bulk verification was unlikely to be benign.
This is still in place on Hermes. The eventual aim is to replace this with a
more tailored system.
* Pine 4.44 has been released and it is planned to upgrade Hermes to this at
Easter.
* The version of Mulberry recently installed on the PWF has a problem with
previewing attachments, which may lead to some user confusion.
* The fileservers have been upgraded to OnTap 6.1.1R2.
* The DLT attached to the fileservers has "eaten" another tape. The unit is
currently returned for investigation.
* The first destroy run since 1998 led to 27,811 accounts being destroyed and
41 GBytes of disk space reclaimed.
* Hermes and PPSW are now attached to the UPS power supply.
* A serial console server has been purchased.
* The PPSW hardware is ageing and requires replacing. The initial plan is to
move PPSW to share the PCs currently running the webmail service, as these
have spare capacity.
* A beta release of Exim 4 has been running since November. There have only
been a couple of minor problems and these were quickly resolved. This also led
to a review of the configurations on both systems and some modifications have
been made.
* Following discussion in the CUSP the use of the warning message that was sent
when a user's inbox reached 2Mbyte has been discontinued.
* POP access has been disabled for users who have not used POP since
2001-01-01. Access can be re-enabled.
* The CUS useradmin scripts have been modified to support 6 digit UIDs (the
Hermes scripts will be amended over Easter).
* There was an incident of colleteral spam using a false Thor address during
November.
PH outlined release plans for Exim 4, and described an additional facility in
Exim 4 for incorporating a local module for running desired checks before a
message is finally accepted.
There has been no further correspondence about the phone book. The current
year's phone book is now out.s
BKO reported that several ac.uk sites had seen an instance of a collateral spam
with a false HELO given to mislead recipients into thinking that the origin was
the uk site.
SP 2002-01-16