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On Monday 08 December 2003 02:58 pm, 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 Whenever parts of a complex system are changed, there is always the possibility of something bad happening ranging from annoyance to disaster. We all know that this can happen, but I have some faith in the people working here, that they have managed to cover the bases and they'll manage a clean change-over. Certainly they've had their tail feathers singed the last time, so I think they have a certain incentive to do it right. ;-) I will admit to being disappointed of the move away from FreeBSD; I have a distinct preference for the BSD communities way of doing things, but clearly there are many many Linux systems out there doing some pretty heavy duty things, and working quite well. Perhaps the more worrysome aspect of a change over isn't the "we're changing OS's" type of activity, but the "apply this small patch" type of thing were 587 bytes of change results in a monster being born that eats filesystems. I *hate* that. I'm not going to issue a "take cover!" type of message for my people, because I don't think the change warrants worrying folks. --STeve Andre' MSU Dept. of Political Science