noticeboard.ru.ac.za

At about 3AM last night, the University's IMAP server started experiencing problems. Since then, no users will have been able to retrieve their e-mail. Outgoing e-mail should be unaffected by this problem.

On investigation this morning it was discovered that one of the four sticks of memory in the machine had developed a fault. The faulty memory has been removed and the machine is currently in the process of checking its disks prior to booting. This will take in the region of half an hour or so, after which we expect the IMAP server to be available again.

Any incomming e-mail sent during the outage will be queued by the remote mail server and will be delivered during the course of today. It may take a few hours for all remote mail servers to re-attempt delivery.

Just after 12 this afternoon, the IMAP server went into live lockup and stopped responding to connections. We suspect that this is a result of the reduced amount of memory it is operating with.

The machine is in the process of rebooting. As its shutdown wasn't clean, it'll have to check its disks again. This will take 20 minutes to half an hour to complete.

Once the machine comes back up, we'll attempt to reduce its memory utilisation by disabling non-essential services and/or reducing the number of concurrent connections it can handle. Hopefully this will keep the machine stable, albeit at a slightly reduced capacity.

Replacement memory will be ordered during the course of this afternoon.