Email Offline At the Home of Sendmail

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?"

Improper capacity planning

[mysidia]

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.

Capacity planning is supposed to account for reduced capacity due to component failures, system outages, and temporary demand spikes due to restart events.

Re:Nothing to do with Sendmail

[TheRaven64]

Uh, email is decentralised. Anyone can set up a node in the network just by pointing an MX record at a machine. The problem in this case is too many people using the same node. You'll note that while UCB was having problems, email continued to work fine for everyone else unless they had unrelated problems.

Re:Telnet

[Mr. Freeman]

Having a .edu address gains you a lot of credibility when communicating with people outside the university. They are quite valuable. You can often get very quick responses to questions that most companies won't even respond to if they came from a [e-mail] or [e-mail].

Also, email is used for a lot of very important stuff like sending reports, design files, etc. Having someone on campus that can fix problems is quite valuable. Your campus email will never be "accidentally" seized, locked out, etc. like people have experienced with google and yahoo. Because the campus maintains backups (or at least, they should), you data will never be suddenly gone with no chance for recovery like people have experienced with google and yahoo.

Re:What does this have to do with Sendmail?

[TClevenger]

That's amazingly cheap. I don't know how you'd do it any cheaper outsourced. Microsoft is $8.80/user in qty. 20,000, and while Google starts at $4.17/user, I couldn't imagine that even 70,000 accounts could bring down the price that much.

Re:IT is not the Problem

[iggymanz]

no way, I work at a Value Added Reseller of hardware and the good sales guy would definitely use your fears to sell you some expandable solution