Category Archives: Reconfiguration

Possible WebMail problem identified

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In our efforts to identify the cause of recent problems with the WebMail server, we have been at a loss for information. We have tried to discover what has been causing the delays and unresponsiveness in WebMail as of late. We have looked at possible memory leaks in daemons, possible attacks, possible miss configurations. All of these have not lead to a clear answer.

It is believed at this point in time that if Ockham’s Razor holds true we may have found the source of the problem. It was discovered late yesterday that the available disk space of the WebMail server was extremely low. Since WebMail serves as an imap gateway temporarily caching and displaying mail messages via a http server, disk space for temporary files is necessary. This has been the best possible explanation for the problems we have seen thus far.

We have increased available disk space on the server. We have also contacted server individuals who reported problems to determine if the issue still persists.

Mail clients reconfigured

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The imap and pop3 daemon used by various mail clients to read e-mail messages from the University’s mail server have been reconfigured. The have been assigned to seperate network interfaces.

one interface as been assigned on-campus imap traffic
one interface as been assigned on-campus pop3 traffic
one interface as been assigned off-campus imap & pop3 traffic

These daemons also have been assigned new ssl certificates by the University’s certificate authority.

Modification to CBord backup

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This morning there were questions posed by the operators about the status of the ntbackup process on the C-BORD Odyssey server around the location of the backup log file.

During the course of my investigation, I discovered that the use of the %Odyssey% variable does not work in all situations. So I modified the tapebackup.cmd file to use the absolute path contained in the %Odyssey% variable.

Mail server load

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As of 13:30 on January 12, 2004 the University mail server had received over 40,000 messages that were rejected or deferred based on the anti-spam rules. In an attempt to reduce this unnecessary load, the mail exchange (MX) records for the mail server in the external DNS were commented out. This will help to send all smtp traffic to the anti-virus gateway. Secondly, the ups-benjamin and mailserver objects were removed from the pix’s smtp group.

Camano PM

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The disk partitions on Camano were modified to isolate disk space for BJP, provide more swap space, and more space for Oracle. Work completed before the 9am end of PM.

Cascade web (Enterprise Manager) was restarted via command line, because the oracle account .profile file was incorrect.

BJP was started by command line, but issues with the startup procedure required a few extra steps to be taken. BJP was up and running as of 9am.