Email Offline At the Home of Sendmail 179
BobJacobsen writes "The UC Berkeley email system has been either offline, or only providing limited access, for more than a week. How can the place where sendmail originated fall so far? The campus CIO gave an internal seminar (video, slides) where he discussed the incident, the response, and some of the history. Briefly, the growth of email clients was going to overwhelm the system eventually, but the crisis was advanced when a disk failure required a restart after some time offline. Not discussed is the long series of failures to identify and implement the replacement system (1, 2, 3, 4). Like the New York City Dept. of Education problem discussed yesterday, this is a failure of planning and management being discussed as a problem with (inflexible) technology. How can IT people solve things like this?"
Re:So the ultimate solution will be outsourcing (Score:2, Funny)
Wow, Squirrelmail. So at least they managed to migrate from pine at some point.
Re:Nothing to do with Sendmail (Score:5, Funny)
It's the backend. When you have too many connections on too few servers, with not enough storage
you usually see this kinda issue.
Knowing the speed and flexibility of university upgrade policies, and knowing sendmail was born around 4.1BSD, and knowing the -BSDs were VAX only until 4.2 or 4.3 or so in the 80s, I'm guessing they're still using the original VAX it was developed on?
Re:It isn't an I.T. problem (Score:4, Funny)
no I'm pretty sure tuition is more than $10
Carrier pigeons coming soon! (Score:2, Funny)
Wow, Squirrelmail. So at least they managed to migrate from pine at some point.
Yeah, they're planning the upgrade from squirrel to carrier pigeon as we speak!