[UKFSN Status] Mail Server Update and news on planned web server upgrade

[Jason Clifford]

After a few extra issues were sorted today the new mail server is in
place and all now seems to be working as it should.

The new server has about 200 times as much storage for customer email
than the old one. The storage problems that caused a couple of outages
last month are now a thing of the past. I expect that the current server
should be more than sufficient to meet UKFSN's growth over the coming
couple of years.

As part of the project to move to the new server I have made a number of
changes which are summarised below:

Firstly the new server is a major software upgrade for every part of the
server. The old one was essentially the same server I set up for email
back in September 2003 with only a few updates. While security updates
had been made the software used to supply services was almost all older
versions updated only for security purposes.

The new server is completely up to date and has been built on a Debian
Linux base which makes it far easier to maintain than the previous one. 

In terms of things customers will actually notice there is one very big
difference - UKFSN customers can now use IMAP for email as well as POP3.
We replaced the POP3 server software with dovecot which is an excellent
IMAP/POP3 server platform. This means you can retain your email on our
server and organise it into different folders. 

It also provides us with the opportunity to expend the email filtering
service however that is not yet done and needs a little more
consideration before I do any work on it.

All good email client software will work with IMAP as well as POP3.

Our existing webmail service has now been switched to use the IMAP
interface. This simply extends the ability to benefit from folders, etc
with IMAP and no functionality is lost.

Currently the webmail service is a very simple system and works well -
it allows those with text browsers and others who either cannot or
prefer not to use a GUI intensive browser full access to the service. We
will continue to offer this webmail system.

We will also be introducing another webmail system soon which will be
far more like a desktop application. It will be AJAX based so it will
only work with browsers that support Javascript and the necessary AJAX
components - basically all of the recent versions of the major GUI based
browsers. That will be some time next month.

Now that the email system is up to date my attention will be turning to
the customer webserver. I will be moving the service onto a new server
which will mean several significant software upgrades. The most
important of these is that PHP will be upgraded to version 5.x as will
MySQL. If you have a PHP based website that uses features of PHP 4 which
are not compatible with version 5 now is the time to start fixing that.

We will be making the switch over to the new web server in the middle of
September. I'll give more notice as to the exact date in a little over a
week.

Finally I'd like to thank all UKFSN customers for your patience last
night and this morning. The work on the email platform was necessary
however I appreciate that it caused many of you inconvenience. It should
however ensure you don't have any further such inconvenience with our
email service.

Jason Clifford
--
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