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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