| 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, R. J. Smith, C.E. Thompson, J.M. Wilkins |
Date of next meeting: 17th March 2004 at 11:15 in C304
The old Sun servers are becoming increasing temperamental: a disk failed noisily on one of the E220Rs causing a stream of SCSI bus errors and on 22nd December one of the E450s caught fire. This hardware is due to be phased out later this year.
During the last week of January 2004, the MyDoom worm caused a great deal of additional load on the PPSW systems. Various load limiters were put in place to try and balance the load more evenly across the 6 systems: this caused delays for some email coming into the CUDN from the outside world. Caching nameservers are being installed on the PPSW systems to remove an obvious bottleneck. The exponential growth of email traffic through PPSW does mean that regular hardware upgrades are likely to be necessary.
The second batch of Cyrus mailstores are all installed (running SuSE 9.0) but are still waiting for suitable network capacity for full service. There have been no further bulk migrations since the last MDCM and this will affect the rollout schedule.
The 2hermes transfer tool is now available on CUS: there have been a few teething problems. Tony gave a presentation to the Techlinks on 21st January and some documentation is now available thanks to Stella.
Around 400 people using IMAP and POP on CUS do not currently have accounts on Hermes, which clearly complicates any migration. It was proposed that Hermes accounts should be created and seeded with password information from CUS. In total around 850 people are currently using IMAP or POP on CUS. Migration from the old to new Hermes mailstore will be done slowly over a number of weeks to try and spread the support load. This will proceed in parallel with the normal bulk migrations for active Hermes users.
Policies for ongoing IMAP and POP use on CUS before final decommisioning will be decided at the next CUS planning meeting.
SPF ("Sender Permitted From") and DMP ("Designated Mailers Procotol") are two similar attempts to combat collateral spam (and to a lesser extent spam) by tieing sender email addresses to the IP address of the sending machine. Both schemes have the substantial problem that they break existing mail forwarding systems, where the sender address rarely corresponds to the sending site. Proposed solutions involve VERP style expansions of the sender address, but this introduces a whole new range of pitfalls and support problems.
The Computing Service needs to warn people that forwarding mail offsite may break if these schemes become popular (at least one major ISP is experimenting with SPF). We also need a contingency plan in case either scheme takes off in a big way.
Microsoft Outlook has been installed on the PWF in order to provide multi-lingual Email facilities and in response to requests for training courses from institutions using Outlook on their own networks. Outlook is not a very well behaved IMAP client but current versions do appear to work reasonably well against both old and new Hermes mailstores.
DPC 2004-02-05