IMAP Server Maintenance – 10pm – 12am EST
We’re planning on performing some maintenance on the IMAP server tonight that will require me to bring the main mail volume offline. The hope originally was to do this work online, but it appears that it is not possible.
During the maintenance window, all mail-related services will be offline. Follow us on Twitter (@GeekISP) for updates along the way.
It’s not clear that this maintenance will directly fix the issues that we’ve seen lately. The hope is that if we’re able to boost the IO performance of the primary mail volume by reconfiguring it slightly, then we’ll relieve some of the pressure in the system and things can return to normal. Absent the underlying cause, it appears to be our best and easiest option at the moment.
Update: 12:01am EST – Mail service has been restored. The original plan had to be scrapped as it was simply taking too long to clone the mail volume to the secondary server. Instead an upgrade to FreeBSD 10 was performed and this went smoothly. Several additional improvements were also planned but not yet executed in an effort to minimize the total outage. These include migrating from courier imap to dovecot as well as moving authentication data into MySQL.
We will likely need to perform another service interruption at some point in order to execute the original plan of changing our disk layout, but the aforementioned newly planned items can likely be handled, at least mostly, while still online.