NACS Enterprise Services

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NACS Enterprise Services

• John Ward

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Agenda

• History
• Current Services
• Futures
• Possible directions

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HISTORY AND BIRTH OF ENTERPRISE SERVICES

• Old days
• big Sun hardware
• E4E - POP and telnet/Pine, faculty/staff only,
  one server
• EA - pop and telnet/pine, students only,
  three-machine cluster
• Local disk

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History

• 1998(?) - purchased Network Appliances for high
  performance and redundancy for E4E and EA.
• Enterprise Services launched "advanced services,
  multiple tiers, merging Orion and E4E namespaces"

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Strategic Decisions

• Where possible, use RAIS/RAIC of PCs with linux
  instead of monolithic Sun (etc) hardware.
• NetApps abstract storage needs from CPU needs.
• Leverage the network to make mail spools, home
  directories, etc appear across multiple servers.

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Strategic Decisions

• Merge E4E, Orion and EA namespaces into common
  NIS database. This will allow multiple servers
  and services to all serve UCI's population.

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New Expanded Services

• Increased Disk Quota
• Corporate Time
• IMAP
• WebMail
• POP
• Web interface to E4E

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Increased Disk Quota

• Current policy 20MB
• Hard quota (enforced) 50MB
• Can purchase additional quota100MB 5/month
• Users can check their quota at
• http//www.e4e.uci.edu/

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Corporate Time

• Testing began June 1999 as a pay-for service.
• Launched Nov 1999
• No time or budget for new hardware
• Monolithic application needs monolithic hardware
• Launched on E4E as staff/faculty service.
• Strategic decision - migrate services off of E4E
  over time, leaving server as CT-only.

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IMAP

• Tested on E4E
• Deployed on imap.uci.edu linux RAIS w/ DNS
  round-robin
• Servers mount spools, home dirs from NetApps over
  NFS.
• Only for "e4e" users, i.e. faculty/staff
• Baseline" service - part of 'free' email for
  employees

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WebMail

• Launched April 2000 on E4E as staff/faculty
  baseline service.
• UCInetID login to E4E via IMAP.
• Added user_at_mailhost login as convenience to
  campus.
• Plans immediately made for migration to Linux
  standalone server, pending vendor support
• Webmail now running on dedicated hardware, RAIS.

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POP

• pop.uci.edu
• linux RAIS w/ DNS round-robin
• Mounts "E4E" spools from NetApp
• ea-pop.nacs.uci.edu

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Mail summary

• IMAP, POP, E4E servers all use NIS server for
  management/ authorization of users.
  Faculty/staff can get their mail via
• POP pop.uci.edu
• IMAP imap.uci.edu
• WEB webmail.uci.edu
• Vacation and quota check
• http//www.e4e.uci.edu/

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Mail summary (cont.)

• SMTP smtp.uci.edu
• Currently points to E4E, but will (?) become a
  RAIS.
• Semi-opend off-campus relaying for all EA and
  E4E users.

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Futures EA and E4E

• Merge EA and E4E NIS students (EA) get IMAP and
  Webmail overnight.
• One account per person
• All students, staff and faculty
• pop.uci.edu
• imap.uci.edu
• smtp.uci.edu
• webmail.uci.edu

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Futures Corporate Time

• New web client, static URLs for public schedules.
  (example)
• Outlook client (pending new UC pricing
  negotiation)
• Integrate with UCInetID passwords.

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Futures - Quotas

• Fiscal Year 2001/2002
• Academic Senate members 100MB
• Depending on budget, raise all employee quotas to
  50MB, maybe 100MB.

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Futures WebMail

• Purchased by new vendor, who is taking the
  product in license bundle and pricing directions
  we don't necessarily like.
• New version has new bugs awaiting updates.
• Will reevaluate solutions and options during FY
  2001/2002.
• Availability for students.

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Possibilities -1

• Layer 4 Content Switch
• Intercepts and redirects port-level traffic.
• Example POP connection to e4e.uci.edu is
  redirected to pop.uci.edu
• User never sees the difference.
• Enables comprehensive server namesmail.uci.edu
• Could be expensive single point of failure.

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Possibilities - 2

• Mount home directories via desktop protocols
  (CIFS)
• Web publishing (WebDAV)

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Possibilities - 3

• Server-side email virus scrubber
• ACAP
• Application Configuration Access Protocol
• http//asg.web.cmu.edu/acap/

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Questions?