OIT SysCore

We've removed the SMTP Message Size limit from our mailservers. Now you can send your friends 120MB files. "yay"

We've been tracking the status of our AFS servers since their "problems" at the end of last week, and have nailed the issue down to a redux of some of the problems we had in the fall due to thread resource contention. While we had fixed 99% of the problems last semester by working around the code that was causing the contention, there still seems to be some instances where a state can be reached which causes thread deadlock. We're working with some of the OpenAFS folks on things to look at to further reduce the instances of deadlock.

Our Spam mail filter has been modified to correctly support the whitelisting of SMTP-AUTH authenticated mail on our servers. Therefore, sending mail using 'smtp.umbc.edu' and authenticating to it using SMTP AUTH will allow your mail to bypass our spam flagging (and filtering.) This was the behaviour in our pre-January mail environment, and was an oversight when converting to our new system.

I've changed Blackboards DB internal mirrors to be software based as opposed to hardware based. This will make it much easier to crack the mirrors before running an upgrade(like the soon to be applied SP2)

After doing some optimization to get our NIS map "refresh" process to take less than 3 hours -- it takes 15 minutes now -- we're now refreshing the contents of our maps nightly.

This means that accounts that are supposed to be "deactivated" will actually be deactivated when they're supposed to be, and "leavins" left from account renames and other odd operations will also get cleaned up.

For linux machines, the version of GNU Binutils in AFS (/usr/local) has been upgraded to 2.16.

For Solaris 10/x86, Solaris 8,9,10/sparc, and Linux, the MySQL clients and client libs have been upgraded to 5.0.18. Note that our MySQL server currently runs version 4.1.18, and we want to move that to 5.0.x in the future as well, but the clients must be upgraded first before we can move ahead with that. In case you're wondering, connecting to a 4.1.x server with a 5.0.x client will work fine.

The problems causing the mail servers to periodically "spaz" and cause one or two of them to not accept mail correctly might actually be fixed now. There was an incorrect usage of a mutex around some socket code in the Spam & AntiVirus filtering modules which caused various threads to trounce on themselves.

The user web server, userpages.umbc.edu, was upgraded today to a Sun 280R which used to be milter1. It is now running on www4 and the old server, www9, has been decommissioned.