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

2. 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)

3. (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

4. What did we end up with? Dovecot IMAP server software
see
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

5. 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

6. 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)

7. 'Issues' We have a 'known issues' page on the ITS3 wiki
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 if you see anything noteworthy or buggy.

8. 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