Student E-mail Server Move Postponed

By Dr. Ty Young, UNIX Systems Administrator

We reported in last month's Benchmarks Online that the Computing Center’s Academic Computing Services UNIX group would be migrating all E-mail accounts (including all mail folders and inboxes) over to a faster and more powerful system in the latter part of February. Unfortunately the best laid plans of mice, men, and the UNIX Services group went awry.

What went wrong?

The preliminary information we received from Execmail, the vendor of the mail server software, indicated that the migration should take about 12 hours total, for 19,000 accounts containing about 5MB each of mail.

What we found out, however, was that they were wrong. Our calculations indicated something more on the order of 29 days. Not wanting to withhold E-mail from 19000 users for a month, we're re-scheduling this process to complete it over a period of a few weeks.

What Next?

We've elected to re-schedule the migration of mailboxes (Inboxes and mail folders) from Jove onto the new server for a later date -- actually, several later dates, over the course of a couple of weeks. Mail delivery resumed on Jove, and all mail that was delivered to Venus was restored to inboxes on Jove.

We will draft a schedule and then proceed with the migration, probably in segments so as to affect bunches of users over a shorter period of time (rather than the process we started originally.) Check Jove System News for the latest information on this topic.