[6304] in Release_7.7_team
Re: po15 mail testing
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jacob Morzinski)
Mon Mar 23 15:29:00 2009
To: William Cattey <wdc@mit.edu>, Garry Zacheiss <zacheiss@mit.edu>
Cc: release-team@mit.edu, debathena@mit.edu, jmorzins@mit.edu
From: Jacob Morzinski <morzinski@MIT.EDU>
Date: Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:27:55 -0400
In-Reply-To: <Release_7.7_team:6294@unknown-discuss-server> (William
Cattey's message of "Thu, 19 Mar 2009 17:40:04 -0400")
Message-ID: <w6mr60oxcn8.fsf@horobi.mit.edu>
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Hi Garry and Bill,
I apologize for stepping into what may be an old discussion, but
alarm bells are going off in my head.
As a quick plea, could you give me advance warning before doing
something that would change my hesiod "pobox" record?
Fixing Hesiod to reflect a person's "primary" email account might have
the side-effect of blocking the entire Help Desk from logging in to
http://webmail.mit.edu/ (assuming that webmail uses Hesiod).
This would be horribly painful if it were implemented before the
Help Desk is prepared for it.
The details are:
- To test and support both Exchange and IMAP, we need to be able
to receive mail in both systems and we need to be able to log
into both systems.
- The exchange server will only accept mail if the recipient
has set Exchange as their primary mail server in Moira.
If your primary mail server is IMAP, the Exchange server
will redirect anything it gets back to your IMAP server.
- Fortunately, the IMAP server is not so picky, it doesn't care
about the primary mail setting. You can set primary mail to
Exchange and split to IMAP (po##.mit.edu) and things work fine.
- As a result of the first three points, anybody in IS&T who has
been testing Exchange has their primary mail set to Exchange,
even if they don't like Exchange and use IMAP regularly.
Most people are not aware that this is their primary setting,
they were only told that their mail was being "split" and they
didn't think they needed to learn all the gory details. (When
I checked with Bill, he knew his mail was split but was not
aware that his primary mail was set to Exchange.)
So far, this has worked okay, IS&T staff can receive mail in both
systems and can log into both systems, so can test and support both.
My fear is that if my Hesiod info changes to say
"jmorzins EXCHANGE exchange.mit.edu", then:
1) I won't be able to use webmail, or help people with webmail.
2) I won't be able to use Pine, or help people with Pine
3) I'll get other bad problems from the parts of Athena that assume
my hesiod information points to an IMAP server.
I haven't thought about whether there is a clever solution that
allows helpdesk staff to receive mail in both systems and log
into both systems.
The brute-force solution would be to set up a twenty or thirty
second accounts for helpdesk staff and students, giving each
person one account for Exchange and one account for IMAP.
If it's necessary to do this, we'd need a few days to notify
everybody and let them choose which account is which.
If the brute-force solution of "second accounts for everybody"
becomes necessary, please give me advance warning, so I have
time to coordinate with my boss and colleagues about redoing our
mail setups.
Thanks,
-Jacob
William Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU> writes:
> I told Garry that the Hesiod setup for users migrated to Exchange
> looked incorrect. He said that that was a known and temporary
> situation. He said that as soon as he could check in with Mark to
> sanity check it, he'd fix the Hesiod information so that it would
> reflect a person's primary Email account, whether that be a PO
> server or exchange.mit.edu.
--
Jacob Morzinski <morzinski@mit.edu>
Client Support Services
Information Services and Technology
