Mark Norman and Ray Miller Sysdev Team Herald work Summer 2007 Mark Norman and Ray Miller Sysdev Team

The main output/objectives Increase in quota to 1 GiB Achieved, plus optional quotas up to 3GB on case by case basis Extra software resilience Achieved by move to Dovecot and Exim4 Postfix still being investigated for possible future move Look into hardware resilience Achieved – became obvious that we needed to move from SAN storage Note that we WERE originally going to upgrade the hardware by Hilary 2008! (i.e. we had to pack a lot more in than we intended in this time scale)

(Some of which became more pressing after the project began) The main issues (Some of which became more pressing after the project began) Software needed updating To meet increased quotas Many others moving up from UW-IMAP Storage was difficult to manage Performance issues Could have been software or hardware or s/w-h/w interaction

What did we end up with? Dovecot IMAP server software see http://www.dovecot.org/ MTA: exim4 (but possible move to postfix later) Sun Fire X4100 M2 machines with direct attached storage (SAS) SATA used for backups Other new associated hardware, switches etc. Exim4 used due to deployment time constraints. We are still very interested in using postfix. RAID6

How easy was it? Limited numbers of people to work on project Most of time only 2 active Up to 4 people in the latter months Had some problems: Dots in folder names mbx -> maildir Updating Webmail to cope with folders containing folders+messages

Big thanks to our testers Had lots of (alpha and) beta testers within OUCS ITSS were excellent too: 49 people responded to the survey Did we miss anything? Of course, but we look to be on track for the start of term for all accounts (old and brand new)

'Issues' We have a 'known issues' page on the ITS3 wiki https://wiki.oucs.ox.ac.uk/itss/ HeraldIMAPUpgradeNotesAndKnownIssues Please add to it! Most likely issue to be seen as very important is to do with Webmail Slight changes to GUI for creating, renaming (and possibly deleting) folders Messages and folders within folders “Please add to it” Also please email sysdev@oucs.ox.ac.uk if you see anything noteworthy or buggy.

Summary Everyone (whatever status) has 1GiB quota Increased up to max of 3 GiB if a case can be made We had to make wholesale hardware changes Further work planned but should not disrupt service e.g. we need to look at Webmail clustering, using a proxy, better backups, work to improve resilience even more Includes work to address: # Removal of single points of failure # Shared mailboxes # Improved webmail # Server side filtering # User controlled data restore