News - Mar 2005

Mar 17 2005 - Webmail is much more stable today. We have 4 servers running, some of which are much faster. None have been overloaded today. We still have some cleanup and rearranging to do, and they might result in some brief outages, but only a minute or two here and there.

If anyone is still having trouble, please try closing your brower (not minimizing the window, but exiting the application) first and then restarting. This should clear any cached information that might interfere.

Thanks again for your patience.

Bob Goldstein

Mar 16 2005 - Yesterday we replaced webmail with the election demo on an emergency basis. We brought two servers online for that replacement, and although they were busy, they were still within normal range during the day. So we thought things were ok, and we prepared a third server just in case.

This morning, the two servers were completely overwhelmed, and the third was not enough. Since yesterday's decision was an emergency, the full procedure for making new servers was not fully tested, so that made adding a fourth a bit challenging. Having a disk crash in the middle of it all just added to the pleasure.

As I type this (4:30pm) we have 4 servers reponding (2 of which are faster then the two we started with), and none are overloaded at all. Of course, it's the end of the day, so we'll have to see what the load is like tomorrow. But we're certainly in better shape now than this monning, by far. Tomorrow we'll we consolodating our new setup, so that adding new servers is a bit more graceful.

I appologize for the troubles, and thank you for you patience.

Bob Goldstein

Mar 15 2005 - Our current webmail server is hacked and can't be fixed. We've directed traffic to the election site temporarily so you can continue to read your email. We didn't plan to do this so suddenly, so we'll try to smooth out the rough spots as we find them.

The longer story is this. For many years, we've run a commercial version of a web-based email client, which we called webmail. The actual mail is stored on backend servers (mailserv, icarus, tigger), not on webmail itself; webmail is just one way to read your email.

The commercial product is no longer sold or supported, and we don't have source, so troubleshooting and customization is either difficult or impossible. This situation was the major motivation for finding a new web-based email reader, although finding one with better features is also nice.

As luck would have it, we're about a week too late. Webmail was hacked and we have to shut it down. As an emergency procedure, we have directed the name webmail.uic.edu to the server used for the election demo. And we've added a second election server to handle the load, although at this stage, it's just a guess as to what we really need.

So you have no choice but to try out Squirrel or Horde/IMP, the two contenders for webmail replacement. Long term, this was inevitable, but we didn't intend to make the switch quite so suddenly!

Don't worry about your addressbooks. They are left behind only temporarily, but we should be able to rescue them later and insert them into the winner, once we have it in production.

Bob Goldstein, ACCC

Mar 12 2005 - About one of six mailserv users will not be able to access their email tonight from 10pm-1am. We are repairing a file storage problem. Sorry for any inconveniences caused.

Mar 09 2005 - The mailserv system experienced problems authenticating users and delivering mail from appx 1pm until 2pm today. Mailserv, for a reason not quite clear yet, was periodically unable to do lookups in our LDAP servers, and could not authenticate netids. Some email was rejected with "user not known".

We are still trying to determine the root cause of this problem and apologize for any resulting inconveniences.

Mar 09 2005 - Remember, the ACCC's election to choose a WebMail replacement continues until Monday, March 21. Over 2000 people have voted so far, and both programs have many enthusiastic backers.

And you can change your mind, so keep checking out both candidates. We've made a few small changes to Squirrel, for example, including having it save work if you're composing email and it times out or if you close the compose window. (Horde IMP warns you when you're about to time out when you're composing a message.)

See below for the links you need.