The final transfer of all remaining mail services from nevis1 to franklin will take place at 16:00 Mon 12-Apr-2004. The transition began will the installation of the new mail server, and continued when I turned off mail processing on nevis1. With this final change, nevis1 will be out of the "mail server business," and offer no more mail facilities than any box on the Linux cluster.

What is being done

There are two changes that will be made:

1. Even though the bulk of the mail services have been transferred to franklin, the IP name mail.nevis.columbia.edu has continued to point to nevis1. The mail server has received every other mail alias I could think of:

   smtp.nevis.columbia.edu
   pop3.nevis.columbia.edu
   imap.nevis.columbia.edu

   At 4PM Mon 12-Apr-2004, the name mail.nevis.columbia.edu will be point to the mail server franklin. It may take as much as a day for the new name propagate through the Internet, but Nevis and Columbia systems will see the change almost immediately.

2. The IMAP and POP3 servers on nevis1 will be shut down. If you want to read your mail, you must do so through the mail server.

   Before you panic, read the rest of this page. You can still read your mail on nevis1, but you'll have to tell your mail reader to use the main mail server to access your mail.

How will this affect you?

Chances are that you won't notice any difference.

Here are the main exceptions:

• If your mail reader was configured to read your mail from mail.nevis.columbia.edu, the program will now attempt to access franklin instead of nevis1. This will probably be transparent to you, unless:
  • Your nevis1 password is different from your Linux cluster password. I copied the passwords from nevis1 to the Linux cluster about two years ago. If you've changed your nevis1 password since then, you'll have to remember your old password to read your mail. If you have any difficulties with your Linux cluster password, contact me and I'll reset it.

  • Your home directory on the Linux cluster is different from your home directory on nevis1; the symptom of this is that your mail messages will seem to disappear.

    You'll have to copy your mail messages to your Linux cluster home directory. I published directions on how to do this a couple of years ago.

• If you still read your mail on nevis1, either through Pine or Netscape, you'll probably have to change your mail reader configuration. The directions on what to change are available via the main Nevis mail page.

Why is this being done?

Here are the main reasons for the change:

• The version of the mail software on nevis1 is old, unsupported, and represents a security risk. In order to upgrade it, I'd have to upgrade the entire operating system. It's simpler to just shut off the mail services.

• By reducing the state of the mail services on nevis1 to the same as any other machine on the Linux cluster, it encourages migration to the the cluster. If your only use of nevis1 is to run pine to read your mail, you might as well switch to using one of the Linux boxes associated with your working group; there will be no advantage to using nevis1 anymore.

• It makes logical sense for the name mail.nevis.columbia.edu to point to the mail server. If you look at the instructions on how to configure your mail reader, you'll notice that you can use every alias for the mail server except the most logical one: mail.nevis.columbia.edu. By changing that, it becomes easier for everyone to configure their mail clients.

• By turning off the IMAP and POP3 services on nevis1, we keep the super-clever folks from putting nevis1.nevis.columbia.edu (or even 129.236.252.3) in the mail reader's configuration. Anyone with a problem reading mail on the Linux cluster should let me know what it is and we'll fix the problem. It is counter-productive to avoid such problems by continuing to the older, less-secure software on nevis1

Frequently Asked Questions

Is mail being turned off entirely on nevis1?

No, it's not. It would be more accurate to say that mail processing is being turned off on nevis1. After this change, all mail sent from nevis1 will be forwarded to the main mail server. All mail that you want to read on nevis1 must be fetched from the mail server. This is the same as on any other machine on the Linux cluster.

What about mail that's sent to old-style mail addresses like jsmith@nevis1.columbia.edu?

That was already taken care of at the time that franklin became the main mail server. Mail sent to addresses of the following form will reach you without any problems:

jsmith@nevis.columbia.edu
jsmith@nevis1.nevis.columbia.edu
jsmith@nevis1.columbia.edu

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