Sunday, December 20, 2009

Unexpected Downtime

Sometime this morning, one of the OCF's mail servers stopped responding to user logins. We are working as fast as we can to resolve the issue, but do not have a time estimate. The server that hosts webmail also recently stopped responding; we are working on restoring it, but are focusing on bringing mail services back online.

The mail server in question — mail.OCF.Berkeley.EDU — provides IMAP, POP, and SMTP access to mail, but stores users' email on the central file server. Old mail is still accessible via command-line mail clients like mutt and pine on our login servers (apocalypse and tsunami), and incoming mail will be queued on a different server and delivered when mail.OCF is restored.

We will post updates when we have them. If you need assistance, someone in the OCF IRC channel may be able to assist you, but please be patient if nobody responds right away. :) We apologize for the downtime and inconvenience, and wish you a wonderful winter break.

UPDATE (23 December): mail.OCF is partially online. You can access your mail with an IMAP or POP client such as Mozilla Thunderbird, but we are still ironing out some issues with sending mail — please let us know if you have any problems. Webmail is still down, but we are hoping to have that service restored within the next few days.

UPDATE (27 December): We've restored the server that hosts webmail and documentation. Thank you for your patience — have a happy New Year!

UPDATE (30 December): Our SSL certificate issuing authority, ipsCA, kinda dropped the ball and forgot to renew their root certificates before they expired on December 29th. As a result, unless you're using IE8, you will get a warning about an untrusted SSL certificate whenever you try to access OCF services like POP, IMAP, SMTP, Webmail, or account tools. We are working on obtaining updated certificates from a slightly more on-the-ball certificate authority, but in the meantime, you may continue accessing your OCF services by overriding the certificate warnings. However, in general this is a bad practice to get in the habit of, and we suggest that you wait until we have installed the updated certificates before attempting to connect.

UPDATE (5 January): We have installed the new SSL certs for mail.ocf and webmail.ocf. Let us know if you have any issues connecting to these services, and happy new year!