Minutes of the 137th Mail and Directory Coordination meeting held on Wednesday, 8th November 2006.

Date of next meeting: 10th January 2007 at 11:15 in C304.

1) Hermes and PPSW

All of the SATA based Cyrus systems now have 3ware RAID controllers. The last two systems required some BIOS option fiddling to work reliably.

Power work on 03/10/2006 caused a unscheduled power failure to five racks full of equipment, including all of the live Cyrus systems and four out of seven live PPSW systems. All of the systems which lost power returned without problems (and passed file system and Cyrus database checks). A scheduled powerdown for power work the following Sunday (08/10/2006) killed the RAID array on one of the Cyrus backends.

SpamAssassin and ClavAV have both been updated to the latest version. New versions of SpamAssassin are being released every month at the moment. The proportion of email which is spam continues to increase at an alarming rate. Graphs showing spam filtering on PPSW are available at http://canvas.csi.cam.ac.uk/stats/ppsw/.

2) Mailman

There are currently 1672 Mailman mailing lists (out of at least 3000 active mailing lists): the rollout has been reasonably smooth. The one recurring complaint to mail-support has been that Mailman conflates list management and moderation. Notification messages are always sent to both groups of people while the old lists systems drew a sharp distinction between the two roles. The Mailman documentation will need to be improved as we gain experience of running the system. The main problem is that Mailman provides a bewildering array of options, most of which can be safely ignored by most list managers.

3) Insecure access to Hermes

33 Hermes users are still able to make insecure connections to Hermes. A further 451 external addresses have been added for people and machines on the CUDN who are incorrectly using smtp.hermes.cam.ac.uk rather than ppsw.cam.ac.uk as an SMTP smarthost. A final cutoff date for all insecure access will be decided at the next MDCM.

The IMAP/POP proxy code has been modified so that it will advertise NOLOGIN capability on unencrypted connections once all insecure access has been removed. This should stop mail clients from making any attempt to send usernames and passwords over unencrypted connections.

4) Any other business

Assorted experiments with the Exim configuration on CUS picked up a bug in the retry algorithm for mail destined to PPSW, now fixed. There has been a proposal to take over management of the exim.org DNS domain.