We had to shut down the D-PHYS mail server on short notice for replacing faulty hardware. Mail service should be back in the evening.
Mails sent to D-PHYS during the downtime will be on hold on the sending side.
Update, 19:30: The dust is settling. We're soon back to normal.
In order to perform system-level maintenance work, we schedule a maintenance downtime of the D-PHYS mail server today (Thursday, 2nd of July 2015) starting at 17:00. We expect the downtime to take about one hour.
During the downtime all mail services (sending mail, receiving mail, accessing mailboxes, webmail, etc.) will be unavailable. Mails sent to D-PHYS users during the downtime will be held back on the sending side and will be delivered after the downtime.
We will post an update as soon as mail services are back.
Update 19:30: Took a little bit longer than expected, but everything is back to normal now.
We have scheduled a software maintenance of the D-PHYS mail server for tomorrow, Wednesday, the 18th of June 2014, starting in the late afternoon around 5pm. A downtime of all D-PHYS mail services during the evening will be part of the maintenance. The downtime is expected to take approximately 15 to 30 minutes.
During the downtime sending and receiving e-mails will not be possible and the web mail service will be not available. Incoming mails during the downtime will be delayed.
Additionally there will be a downtime of our "BackupPC" backup service for laptops and lab PCs due to server relocation on Thursday (19th of June 2014) starting around 9am.
On Monday the public was made aware of a severe bug in OpenSSL, a cryptography library which is used as the core of many cryptographically secured IT services. Since the bug was in the Heartbeat extension it has been named "Heartbleed".
This bug allowed attackers to stealthily access parts of the memory used for cryptographic actions, i.e. it may include digital keys in use on servers or passwords transferred over encrypted connections.
If you used any password-protected D-PHYS web services or the D-PHYS mail server between 12th of December 2013 (or used the BackupPC web-interface since end of 2012) and Tuesday, the 8th of April 2014, there is a very small chance that your D-PHYS password and possibly other transmitted data may have been leaked to an attacker. We currently have no indication that this has actually happened on our servers.
To be safe, you might want to change the password of your D-PHYS account and any other account where the same password is used. See this Heise article for a discussion (in German) about whether you should change your password or not.
On Thursday, the 9th of January 2014, starting in the late afternoon, we will run multiple software updates on the D-PHYS mail server. We do expect multiple downtimes throughout the evening, partially of single mail services, partially of the whole mail server.
This will likely also delay the delivery of incoming mails up to several hours.
Update, 22:30: Everything back to normal.
We will perform a maintenance reboot of several infrastructure servers on Thursday, 16th of May 2013, starting around 5pm. This will cause a downtime of all e-mail related services (receiving + sending mail, accessing webmail and non-cached mails) as well as the license server for IDL, the control server for Condor grid computing, and most hosted virtual machines.
We expect the downtimes to be short and sequential.
Update 17:50: Everything went fine, we're back to normal.
We have scheduled a downtime of the D-PHYS mail server for hardware maintenance on Friday, 1st of June 2012, starting after 4pm and lasting approximately half an hour. During the downtime sending and receiving mails will not be possible. Incoming mails will be slightly delayed.
Update 19:30h: Everything back again and looks fine. Performance may be slightly decreased for a day or so until the RAID has rebuilded.
Preparations took longer than expected, so we started later. The maintenance downtime itself also took longer due to some some unexpected issues which had to be resolved before we could continue start all service again. We're sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.
For some hardware and other maintenance we schedule a downtime of our mail server today (Fri, 13th of April 2012) evening after 6pm.
The downtime will likely take less than one hour. During the downtime you will neither be able to access your mails on the server nor to send mails via our server. Mails which are sent to the Dept. of Physics won't get lost, but will have some lag.
On Thursday, 4th of May 2010, starting at 5pm we will migrate our webmail service to the new mail server. Since there are no version upgrades of the webmail applications Roundcube and Twig, it will be a smooth transition and you shouldn't even notice the migration. The only thing which can happen is that you get logged out of webmail if you use webmail while the DNS entry changes to the new server address.
Update, Thursday morning: As yesterday morning's unexpected outage of the old mail server showed further hardware problems, we rescheduled moving the incoming (SMTP) mail server functionality to the new mail server to fit into today's maintenance window, too.
This will also be done by switching DNS entries, so you should not experience any interruption nor do you need to change any configuration. However this may cause some temporary issues (e.g. delays) since it does involve new software versions as well as new authentication backends.
Update, 22:45: New webmail and incoming mail server seem to work fine, nearly all users already use the new service installation.
At around 8am we noticed (different) hardware issues with our SMTP server wiggis as well with one of our Xen hosting servers. This also affected the IDL license server. The problems have been temporarily solved and since approx. 10:30am both systems are working again as before. Expect though maintenance downtimes for those services within the next week.
