Minutes of the 124th Mail and Directory Coordination meeting held on Wednesday, 6th April 2005

Date of next meeting: 18th May 2005 at 11:15 in C304

1. Hermes and PPSW

The replacement PPSW hardware is installed and should come into service shortly. Live testing of Mailman as a replacement mailing list system should begin when some of the old PPSW hardware becomes available.

The 16 Cyrus servers have all been patched and rebooted without any downtime. While this is possible using the replication engine to juggle accounts back and forth, it is a time consuming process. An hours outage to patch systems may be a more cost efficient use of our time.

2. Plaintext access to Hermes

A schedule for the withdrawal of plaintext telnet, http and FTP access in summer 2005 and the phased withdrawal of plaintext IMAP and POP between summer 2005 and summer 2006 has been drawn up and advertised to users. Warning messages (pointing to some documentation for SSH and SFTP) are needed on the telnet and FTP login banners.

3. SMS to Email Gateway

The telecoms office provide a landline to mobile phone (GSM) gateway. This gateway also provides a bidirectional Email to SMS Text Message gateway though the license is restricted to 45 email users. The MDCM expressed concern that there did not appear to be any authentication or access control on this gateway. Email users can send SMS messages to any mobile phone, and the university picks up the bill.

4. Delayed message warnings on PPSW

PPSW sends a warning message back to the sender if a message cannot be handed on to the next Mail Transfer Agent in the delivery chain after 24 hours. In contrast, CUS sends a warning message after 4 hours, and a second message after 24 hours. However now that CUS hubs its outgoing mail to PPSW, the 4 hour warning only applies to local messages.

There was some discussion about this difference in behaviour. While a 4 hour warning would create significantly fewer problems on the new Hermes system than on the old system because of the larger quotas, there was no great enthusiasm for changing the delay_warning setting on PPSW. A particular problem is the large number of mail systems which hub their incoming mail through PPSW. It is quite common for mail systems on the CUDN to be unavailable for a number of hours. Outages of more than a day are much less common.

5. Long form names

The first institution lined up to try out long form mail and web domains is still trying to sort out SSL certificates for their Web servers. Long form email domains should be much less of a problem (PPSW does all the work).