| Present: | P. Hazel, R.J. Dowling, K.M. Jeary, F.A.N. Finch, C.E. Thompson. D.P. Carter, R.J. Smith, A.A. Schneider, R. Stratford, J.M. Wilkins, P. Stewart, |
Date of next meeting: 12th November 2003 at 11:15 in C304
There seems to be an increasing trend of people arriving at the University with existing email accounts at an external site (most obviously free Webmail providers such as Hotmail) who continue to use these external accounts for the duration of the course. This is particularly understandable in the case of people on one year courses.
The complication is that many departments and colleges expect @cam and @hermes addresses to work, in particular when generating mailing lists. The computing service needs to provide some documentation for new users explaining how to redirect Hermes mail (and by consequence @cam mail) to an external address using the Webmail interface.
A list of people who should not be migrated from old to new Hermes until proper migration tools (from CUS to new Hermes) are available needs to be drawn up. The IMAP server on CUS needs to be modified to stop new CUS users from using IMAP, in the same way that POP on CUS is blocked for new users.
The page referenced by the bounce message has now been updated.
So far 1284 people have been moved to the single Cyrus mailstore system named "cyrus-1". This system has now reached 30,000 mail deliveries a day, which is 100% of anticipated load. 7 other Cyrus mailstores are currently online and ready for users. This years undergraduate intake has already been moved and this years postgraduate intake will be moved during September. After that users will be moved in more or less random blocks (other than people who are clearly reading their mail on CUS, who will be left in the old mailstore until suitable migration tools are available). People will receive a warning message before they are moved and a second message after they are moved. (The exception being this years undergraduate intake, who have no reason to know about the old Hermes system).
The UPS failure on the evening of 25th September revealed a rather unpleasant bug in our customised Cyrus installation: a single missing fsync() statement meant that cache and index files ended up out of step with each other and needed to be fixed using the Cyrus reconstruct utility: a fairly time consuming and I/O intensive job.
Carnegie Mellon University (authors of the Cyrus system) have expressed interest in the replication system and other changes that have been made to the vanilla Cyrus code. A large (1.2 MByte) patch bundle has been submitted containing 22 distinct sets of patches.
The Exim configuration on PPSW is currently being modified so that we can point smtp.hermes at the PPSW systems (the most notable change is TLS support on certain interfaces). We are also preparing to renumber the PPSW systems into an allocated range of IP addresses.
PPSW is currently running at about 50% of capacity. It is likely that additional systems (and the power to feed them!) will be required to cope with peak term time load, particularly in the case of another large various outbreak similar in scale to Sobig.F.
5 users are still using misconfigured mail clients against smtp.cus.cam.ac.uk. These will have to be fixed before smtp.cus is updated to point at PPSW.
Earth Sciences have expressed an interest in moving to use a managed mail domain.
DPC 2003-10-01