OIT SysCore

Our webmail service has been moved from it's old home (a Dell 2650) to a Sun V20z running Solaris x86 for various reasons -- primarily becuase the PHP accellerator that we were using under Linux just "stopped" working for some odd reason.

We've sorry for any of the webmail wonkiness you may have seen this morning/afternoon as a result. It seems to be rather well settled in now -- the ldap address book should be functional again, as well as the multi-byte character stuff.

Procrustes is now running blackboard 7.1 beta 2. It is ready for use as a pilot server for the summer. SSL is not working due to a problem with some of our custom auth code.

We've had a rash of machines on the wireless network infected with spam bots and such. We've change our mail relaying ACLs to require that folks sending mail through our smtp.umbc.edu relay from the wireless be "authenticated" in the same way that external IP addresses are, this means they must either:

• Use SMTP AUTH

or

• Have used IMAP or POP to read mail through the imap/pop.umbc.edu servers within an hour before attempting to send.
  

In the past few weeks, there have been a handful of changes on the AFS backup front:

1) Implentation of persistant disk caching for backup files.
2) Recoding of some of the major utilities into perl (primarily to make
it easy to implement (1))
3) Splitting of the home* backup volumesets in to 6 ((there used to be 4)

And, we might be moving forward with plans to move to an on-disk only backup system, while still running our fulls off to tape for just that extra redundancy.

Remedy has been moved to yet another E250, after the one that it was on started having memory errors (not related to a specific piece of memory...)

The following fileservers will be "restarted" at 2am on Sunday, April 30 2006:
hfs1.afs.umbc.edu
hfs2.afs.umbc.edu
hfs12.afs.umbc.edu

The service outage for users on these servers, which will last approx. 30 minutes, is to install some updated code to avoid a bug which caused hfs10.afs.umbc.edu to crash on Wednesday afternoon.

This will impact access to email & file services for users housed on these servers during the outage. We are sorry for any inconvenience that this may cause.