Monthly Archives: April 2006

Novell Fileserver Outage – This affects MANY things!

A support pack will be applied to EMU’s fileservers, affecting file and print services. This is a routine maintenance procedure to ensure server stability and security.

Working with files on the network during this period is STRONGLY discouraged.

E-mail, calendar and other services that depend on the Royal Password will be unavailable during periods of this outage.

Other services, such as Internet access, Campusweb and Blackboard will remain available.

There will also be a brief (about a minute) outage affecting all services as new equipment is put into service.

Two Webmail Plug-ins Temporarily Disabled

Webmail continues to be problematic. The difficulty seems to be associated with two plug-in modules:

1. AUTO-EXPUNGE is a plug-in that, when enabled, provides for a one-click DELETE function. When disabled, users need to click DELETE to “mark” a message for deletion and then click EXPUNGE to move the “marked” messages from the folder to the DELETED ITEMS folder.

2. FILTERS is a plug-in that provides message filtering functionality for users who have setup message filters (i.e. moving [PMX:# items to a JUNK folder)

Both of these plug-ins have been disabled. Info Systems will continue to seek a resolution of the problem so that they can be enabled.

As technicians work with the system you may see these functions “come and go”.

If you DELETE a message and it “doesn’t go away” look for the EXPUNGE button and click it to complete the delete function.

If your message filters don’t appear to be working you can either manually perform the function of the filters you have defined or wait for a solution to be found by the technicians (which could take several days).

UPDATE: 4/6/06 16:00 With adjustments made to server configuration, both plug-ins are now functioning. Some lingering performance issues remain that will be worked on over the next several days. Webmail services are stable and sustainable.

Webmail unavailable

UPDATE 8:15 PM: The webmail database is causing a memory problem. This outage may continue for several more hours.

UPDATE 9:15 PM: Investigation continues. Will likely be at least one more hour.

UPDATE 10:15 PM: Investigation continues. Problems appear to be significant. May not be resolved for several more hours.

UPDATE 11:15 PM: It is determined that the only reasonable fix is to change to the newer version of Webmail that we have been planning to install later in April. A few limitations (address groups, mail forwarding and vacation notifications) are missing at the moment. It is hoped that with a big effort on 4/5 these can be functioning by the end-of-day 4/5/06.

UPDATE 12:30pm 4/5: Work needed to address the limitations of the original Webmail install of 4/4 have been completed as of noon, 4/5/06.