Minutes of the 123rd Mail and Directory Coordination meeting held on Wednesday, 2nd March 2005

Date of next meeting: 6th April 2005 at 11:15 in C304

1. Hermes and PPSW

There have need no further system hangs on the Cyrus systems caused by firmware on the RAID controller. One system hung on 21st Feburary with some other hardware or software problem: accounts on the system were immediately moved to a replica. Disk use on the Cyrus mailstore has reached 63% of available capacity (just under 5 TeraBytes in total). Additional capacity will be needed soon. 0.16% of the mail stored on Hermes (by volume, not message count) is stored in mail folders named "spam". The oldest PPSW systems (in service for just over three years now) are beginning to show their age: disk failures are become quite common. New machines have now arrived to replace this hardware.

The old Hermes system used to generate tailored bounce messages for accounts which had been cancelled but not yet destroyed. PPSW didn't have enough information to do the same thing when the new Hermes system was introduced. It now does, and we plan to reintroduce the old behaviour.

2. Cammail

The old cammail system is still scheduled to be removed over the summer (apart from a vestigial service for the benefit of Engineering users moving to Hermes).

3. CARET groups project

A MX record for group.caret.cam.ac.uk has now been assigned.

4. Mail in Cambridge

There were some problems with decommissioning the welc.cam.ac.uk domain following the renaming of the department to the Gurdon institute. A senior academic kicked up a fuss at the last minute, after 9 months of parallel running with gurdon.cam.ac.uk. We added a tweak to ppsw so that we can provide special error messages for decommissioned domains (in this case "please try gurdon.cam.ac.uk instead of welc.cam.ac.uk"). At the moment welc.cam.ac.uk is being mapped to gurdon.cam.ac.uk using the long-form support; it will move to having a special error message at the end of April; it will finally be decommissioned properly in the summer.

A managed DNS service (including MX records) is planned for non cam.ac.uk domains associated with national or international projects spanning institutions including Cambridge.

5. Plaintext access to Hermes to be removed

It was proposed that plaintext HTTP and telnet access should be withdrawn during early summer 2005, and plaintext IMAP and POP a year later, leaving SSL encrypted protocols and SSH as the only means of access to Hermes. This will require substantial publicity, especially for IMAP and POP users.

6. Exim conference

An Exim conference was held in Birmingham at the end of February: there were 88 attendees. Philip Hazel and Tony Finch both presented talks which were well received.