Pat & others,
I have the same sense of impending doom. While I think highly of the
mail team, I'm a little shaky on how this was tested.
OS change + hardware changes + features upgrade = ???
I would be concerned about problems from the time of the upgrade all the
way thru January 5-7 as the students return.
Most of my faculty & staff haven't upgraded yet, but even they might be
affected since mail.msu.edu gets first crack at msu.edu messages again.
I think I'll be telling my people about the wonderful new changes to the
mail system, but also warning that there might be some unexpected
downtime and that it would be a good idea to have a backup email account
working.
-John
PS - It seems like this might be an ongoing problem, how to test a large
productional system. I wonder if it might be possible to have a
permanent test bed, say mailX.msu.edu ? Through the magic of software,
people could elect to have their mailbox on that system and be a beta
tester. Probably too complicated.
P Bills wrote:
> NAG,
>
> I'd like to discuss the upcoming mail upgrades and the possibility of
> more outages Something on the project page that has not been part of
> the other notifications is that the system will change over from FreeBSD
> to Suse Linux ((http://project.mail.msu.edu/timeline.html ). While
> this detail may not be of interest to users, it indicates to me that
> users may see a few bumps during the transition. I wanted to get a
> reaction to that from this group.
>
> First, this is not an attack. I like the mail system - the IMAP works
> great and you've ironed out the big proglems we had this summer. The
> proposed upgrades look great. Clearly you've got a good team here, and
> you must have 'compelling' reasons for changing the OS. I also welcome
> the willingness of the mail team to be open about these changes to the
> MSU community and for the team to be self-critical (see the mail.msu.edu
> Angel group).
>
> However, you have to admit we did have many frustrating problems this
> summer. Given that history, I'm a little worried that the change in OS
> will introduce new problems, the symptoms of which will not be detected
> in testing and only present once it goes into production. I'm
> considering warning those users I work with that the possibility of
> problems with email exists for a week or so after the 17th.
>
> Is this unreasonable? Paranoid? I'm not trying to be harsh on the mail
> team -just realistic. It was my impression that problems were due to
> hardware and not software this summer. But I'd like to know what campus
> sysadmins think, and I'd like to be braced if there is a consensus that
> problems are possible. For example, this summer I switched back to
> Pilot so I could get some email done while the problems with hardware
> were being ironed out & I'm prepared to suggest similar email forwarding
> measures for the few users I support if problems crop up (although not
> to pilot). I know that this may not even work given the MX record change.
>
> Pat Bills
> USDA IPM Center
> Entomology
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