To: The Campus Community
From; Jack Suess, VP of IT
Subj: UMBC Campus Email Problems
One of our four primary email servers stopped working Friday and has been unavailable all weekend. We are working to get this back in operation by Monday morning. If you are reading this from your UMBC email account you are not impacted. However your colleagues or students may be. If you notice email to teachers or students not be responded to this is likely the cause. Because those that are impacted can not get their email we want to let their colleagues know what is happening.
UMBC has four mail servers that handle mail for all people using UMBC email. Last week, we had numerous periods where one of the four email servers, MS1, was constantly hanging. Throughout the week we worked with experts on our mail system at Carnegie Mellon and UC-Davis to diagnose the problems. The problem centered around a bug in the operating system of the server we use when dealing with a very large number of fragmented files. On Thursday night we took downtime and tried to patch the server. We brought the patched system up at midnight Thursday and began experiencing the problem again Friday morning.
In consulting with others the best course of action to get a stable working system was to take this system down and defragment the files. The server in question has millions of files and this is very time consuming. This effort was started at 3pm on Friday and is expected to complete very early Monday morning. We continue to monitor this and we will send out an update Sunday evening but we are doing our best to have the system back in operation Monday morning. OIT is capturing all mail that comes in and this mail will be delivered to your account once we get the server back online.
We have set up a spotlight in myUMBC that explains the problem and also explains how you can forward your UMBC email to an off-campus account through myUMBC. At this point we don't recommend this for faculty and staff because once you forward your email any mail queued will be sent to this outside account and no longer reside at UMBC. In addition, some outside email providers will block mail coming from UMBC and this could cause you to lose email.
OIT will send out an update to everyone on Sunday night.