[H-GEN] Centralised email

Craig Eldershaw ce at comlab.ox.ac.uk
Thu Sep 10 03:44:22 EDT 1998


Hi all,

I thought some might be interesed to hear about the new email 
system being implemented here.  (Virtually) all email will be
centralised (it sort of is now anyway).

                        ----------------

They non-technical details of it are (in no particular order):

(1) It will be rolled out towards the end of September to *new
undergraduates only*. They will all be pre-registered, and should receive
their login details along with their university cards.

(2) Other people can start shifting over to it in January if they want. It
won't be compulsory.

(3) Everyone will still be entitled to a sable account if they want one.

(4) Access will be via IMAP, POP3 and a web interface. The web interface
will work on almost any web browser. With the 386s, the best thing to do
would be to setup PC-PINE on them to use the IMAP access - it'll be some
work to get it automated but we should be able to setup a menu offering
telnet to sable or pine to herald.

(5) Usernames will be the same as with sable etc.

Technical details are:

(a) The front facing systems are a couple of fast PCs running Linux with
512MB ram and 2 6GB hard drives each with RAID 1 on 4 gigs of it (or
something similar). They provide load balancing, fail over to each other
etc.

(b) E-mail is held on the IMAP servers, currently two solaris machines
with 320MB RAM and lots of HD space. They are designed to support 4000
users each so they will expand the number to 7-8 eventually.

(c) web based access is supported by more linux boxes (same spec as the
front facing ones) which make a connection to the imap servers

(d) The whole lot are connected by a 24 port 100Mbps switch

                        ----------------

Some nice toys...and an interesting set-up.  All the sw has been built
locally by one of our support staff, Malcolm Beatie (the number three
man in the development of Perl for those who don't know).

One of the big arguments was what would the lowest common denominator be
for access.  They finally decided that XT legacy systems should still be
supported (over a lot of dead bodies...).

Out of interest, another quirk of the systems here is that the entire
uni runs with only a single domain (ox.ac.uk), it's just that all of our
hostnames have fullstops in them.  Centralised indeed...

Cheers,
	Craig.





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