New email server added to campus

The old Georgia College & State University faculty email server is being scrapped to make way for a new state-of-the-art unit, due to higher traffic loads and system upgrades.

The office of instructional and informational technology has decided to upgrade to the newer server because of recent hardware problems the older machine has experienced.

“The faculty/staff server is over six years old and has already experienced hardware failures. It uses the older, less secure version of software,” said Ed Boyd, assistant to CIO for project development. “The recent move to the temporary faculty/staff services last week was a necessity to ensure that email services would continue to operate until we could roll out the new system this summer.”

Some faculty members feel that the new server is a necessity and needs to be done as soon as possible.

“It seemed to me that they really didn’t have a lot of choice,” said English Speech and Journalism professor Scott Dillard. “I want to have the most up to date and the most current way of communication. It will just be a minor hassle.”

Other staff members feel that although the school needs the new server, redirecting their email traffic will be time consuming.

“I have colleagues in so many different countries that it is going to be a big hassle to inform them all,” said Government and Sociology professor Jeffery Blick. “But if it has to be done, I can deal with it.”

New servers were purchased for roughly $34,000 and the cost of the server hardware used by the machines will hover right around $20,000. The money for the new server was sourced from end of the year funds from last summer.

One of the largest factors working against the old server was that it was going to have to be moved into another building and OIIT believed that the old equipment would not survive the shutdown.

“We knew that the original system would not survive the shutdown and relocation process that would take place,” said Boyd. “Over the passage of time, we have to experience some minor data losses, but these have usually been related to users not cleaning out their email boxes and having the machine run out of storage space.”

With the new servers put in place, emailing will be enhanced and changed in many ways.

“There will no longer be a “Pine” email client because the new email software operates in a much more secure and efficient way by saving the incoming email in a database format,” said Boyd. “The web client that will be available for use is much more extensive and user friendly than the current web-interface that has been available to the users. The new server hardware is comprised of some of the latest technology available and provides a much improved processing speed for handling email transmission and receipts. This, in itself, will be an immediate and noticed improvement by the users.”

With the addition of the new features, another important aspect of the system that will be changing is the email addresses.

“For at least the first year of operation, the old email address will be useable along, with the new longer version. Whereas the old email address may have been jdoe@gcsu.edu, the new, longer email address will be john.doe@gcsu.edu,” explained Boyd. “Student email names are already in the longer format. This change is needed for a lot of reasons. One such reason is that both John Doe and Jane Doe work here at GC&SU. Since both names would resolve into the shorten version of jdoe@gcsu.edu, we have an identity problem. And even if John is a gentleman and allows Jane to have the “jdoe” address while he takes the “jdoe2″ address, Sally Smith, who has her own identity conflict with her friend Sarah Smith, can’t look at the jdoe@gcsu.edu address and tell whether it is John or Jane. And as the number of email addresses continues to increase, the identity issue becomes an ever increasing challenge.”

With six months to go before the old servers will be entirely shut down, faculty has some time to re-direct most of their contacts to their new addresses.

“We are going to allow at least 6 months for the faculty and staff users to move their email off of the old server,” said Boyd. “With the continued budget cuts, resource depletions, and no increase in personnel to manage and maintain additional resources, this approach seems to be the only one that is affordable and realistic for the university.”

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Mar 28 2003. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry