Yesterday evening, horde webmail appeared to be misused for sending spam. This could happen because a naive user gave the Science password to spammers. First we stopped horde. This morning we disabled the account of the naive user and restarted horde.

During the weekly reboot (monday mornings), the server got stuck in the BIOS.

In order to test new software, the Peage top-up unit near the Huygens restaurant was switched to maintenance mode. This unit is not used often yet, therefore this wil not have caused problems. Students that wanted to top-up their Peage account, could do that only elsewhere on campus. See the http://www.ru.nl/peage Peage website], locations are the halls of the Erasmus, Spinoza and Library buildings.

Next Tuesday morning, the home server “pile” will be replaced by a new, more powerful server. Because the data have been synchronized with the new server, there will not be much downtime.

The downtime below has been postponed, because we had a few questions on the new server, that could not be answered in time. To be continued… Next Tuesday morning, the home server “pile” will be replaced by a new, more powerful server. Because the data have been synchronized with the new server, there will not be much downtime. The new server should be very dependable: hardware RAID-6, double processors and power supplies and a 5-year support contract from the supplier. The performance has improved, e.g. by using hardware RAID with a 1 GB write cache with battery backup.

This morning, horde webmail appeared to be misused for sending spam. This could happen because naive users gave their Science password to spammers. After we found out who the users were and had them change their password, we decide to also replace a defective cpu fan. Therefore also Mailman mailing lists will be down from 13:00 to 14:00 hours.

This morning, users reported that mail from smtp.science.ru.nl to hotmail users was being bounced by hotmail. We have tried to let the hotmail administrators change this fast, but when this took too long, we changed the IP-number of our smtp-server.

A hardware failure of a boot disk of the fileserver stack was reported Friday morning June 22. We decided to repair this after working hours. Thus at approximately 17:00 the defective boot disk was removed from the machine and replaced by a spare one. Enabling the disk, making it bootable, restoring file systems and rebooting the machine (after removing all snapshots) took a lot of time. When this was resolved Friday evening, the NFS/SMB fileservice was not active on the mounted filesystems. It took a reboot Sunday evening to resolve all problems.

A hardware failure of the server poly was reported at 2012-06-21 14:12. After a restart of the machine, it stopped working again. No more recoveries were attempted and an identical spare machine was outfitted with the disks from the defective server. Disks had to be synchronized before making the machine available again.