Central Notre Dame Email Maintenance

Updated 7/16/08 1:42PM:
Email maintenance, including all background processes, completed Tuesday evening, shortly after 8:00PM.  All Notre Dame email services are functioning normally at this time.

Over the past several days, system administrators upgraded the software on three mail store servers, migrated and converted all email data (approximately 245,000 folders and 36,000 mailboxes) to new drives and partitions which will provide improved performance.  These changes also upgraded the email backup system to provide additional automation of resource-intensive tasks that system administrators perform.

If you have additional questions or problems with email, please contact your departmental IT staff or the OIT Help Desk (631-8111).

Updated 7/15/08 4:45PM:
Most users should not experience any delays accessing priority folders (inbox, outbox, sent, sent messages, etc.) since conversion of these priority mail folders is nearly complete. Conversion of other folders should finish sometime on Wednesday 7/16. The OIT will send out a message to campus when all folder conversions are done. In the meantime, if you have further questions, please contact your departmental IT staff or the OIT Help Desk (574-631-8111).

Updated 7/14/08 3:00PM:
Email performance continues to be slow due to the background process that is part of the weekend maintenance.  Additional details about that work are posted at http://oit.nd.edu/news/maintenance/2008/central_nd_email_maint_2006-07-11.shtml.

System administrators are closely monitoring the system and are making adjustments to tune performance.  There may be intermittent loss of connection to the email service during these periods.

For additional information, please contact your departmental IT staff or the OIT Help Desk (631-8111).

DESCRIPTION:

Scheduled maintenance to the Central Notre Dame Email Service.

MAINTENANCE DATE & TIME:

Start time:  5:00 pm            Friday, July 11, 2008
End Time:  5:00 pm            Saturday, July 12, 2008

*Performance slowness until Tuesday, July 15, 2008 following maintenance

IMPLICATION OF THIS MAINTENANCE:

The University Email System will be unavailable for the duration of themaintenance.
Maintenance is scheduled for approximately 24 hours.

Users of the Central Notre Dame Email System should expect to see slow performance of the service until Tuesday, July 15, 2008. The slow performance is due to a background conversion job that is expected to take 2-3 days to complete.

Users of Exchange and Google mail will NOT be affected by this maintenance.

WHO IS AFFECTED:

• All campus email users.

WHAT IS BEING DONE:

The OIT System Engineers will be making upgrades to the mail servers.

• The mail server software is being upgraded on the three Sendmail mailstore servers
  
• The mailstore is being migrated to new partitions on the NetApp filers, in order to change the underlying file system architecture.
  

The mail server software upgrade and mailstore migration are expected to improve performance and improve the reliability of the mail servers.

USER ACTION NEEDED:

• Webmail users: Logout of webmail by 5:00 p.m. Friday.
  
• All other users: Shutdown all email client software (Eudora, Netscape, Outlook, Outlook Express, Pine, Thunderbird, etc.) by 5:00 p.m. Friday.

CONTACT INFORMATION:

Following this maintenance period, if you experience problems, contact the OIT Data Center at 574-631-5603.