UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE COMPUTING SERVICE

Minutes of the 136th Mail and Directory Coordination meeting held on Wednesday, 20th September 2006.

Present: R.J. Dowling, D.P. Carter, F.A.N. Finch, C.J. Jardine,
P. Mazumdar, B.K. Omotani, P. Stewart, J.M. Wilkins

Date of next meeting: 8th November 2006 at 11:15 in C304.

1) Hermes and PPSW

Four out of six SATA servers have had RAID controllers replaced and 4650 GBytes of data have been moved onto these systems. The supplier has (finally) offered to replace the RAID cards on the remaining two SATA systems. There is a small question mark over the RAID 5 performance of the new 3ware cards under heavy concurrent load compared to the old LSI cards. Consequently, we are currently using RAID 10 (stripe of mirrors) which offers better performance and redundancy but only half the capacity of RAID 5. RAID 10 would allow us to use disks larger than the current 300 GBytes without appalling RAID reconstruct and verify times.

Hermes-1 and 2 (the Webmail and SSH servers) and Canvas (the Hermes useradmin master) have been upgraded from SuSE 9.1 to SLES 9. Three additional PPSW systems have been installed, with all software (Exim/Mailscanner etc) brought up to date. All live systems have been patched.

The Webmail hacker returned on August 24th. The specific exploit had been blocked by the security audit back in April. A small vulnerability remained and has now been blocked.

2) Mailman

Mailman has now been released as a live service with 599 lists and counting. The return path used by the old list system was adjusted to match that used by Mailman on the morning of 5th September. The aging @lists hardware (Pentium III servers) has been replaced by machines donated by Unix support after their backup system was upgraded.

3) Insecure access to Hermes

96% completed. 351 users still able to make insecure connections.

4) Collateral spam from MTAs on the CUDN

The documentation for minimum requirements for MTAs attached to the CUDN has now been updated.

5) Phymail

The mail server for phy.cam.ac.uk has now been completely replaced by a managed mail domain.

6) Alumni Email for the Judge Business School

Terms and conditions for the alumni mail domain have been drawn up and accepted by JBS staff.

7) AOB

Institution Liason presented a survey about the outsourcing of student email from Reading.

DPC 2006-09-20