mail.blacknight.com - emergency maintenance

Message

Summary: We're going to tweak the storage backend for mail.blacknight.com tonight around 22:00 hours. We estimate approx. 30 minutes where e-mail, webmail, imap(s), pop(s) and smtp will be unavailable.

When: Tuesday August 3rd at 22:00 hours until 22:30

What: We've had some complaints about sending and receiving being slow, this is caused by a problem in Courier-Imap where it does a "list" on the users home dir during the authentication process before a list is requested from the mail client. We believe that the NFS servers have more capacity so we wish to restart the daemons after some configuration changes. As this will mean the nfs shares will have to all be unmounted and offline we'll need to shutdown all mail services while we do this. The change isn't major and should take less than 30 seconds, however we have to ensure that no mail is lost so we're shutting the system down.

We also have further storage nodes to go into the cluster but we're putting off this install until we stabilise the current solution.