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NERCOMP EVENT
Electronic Mail Architecture
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Electronic Mail is still the killer app on campus. Killer in more ways than one! As the volume of mail grows from year to year it is a challenge to maintain systems that will keep up with the deluge. E-mail standards were designed in a time when systems administrators generally trusted each other. In the new world of Spam and Viruses maintaining robust, standards
based, mail systems can be a major challenge.
How do we design e-mail systems that can handle the load and are scalable into the future? How do we provide e-mail service that is as reliable as telephone service? Is POP dead and IMAP the way of the future? Or vice versa? How does all this stuff work anyway?
This one-day workshop will present several different approaches to e-mail systems design, and several perspectives on how it all works. We will try to answer the questions posed above. Attendees will also have a chance to share ideas and to brainstorm solutions to the problems we all face in providing industrial strength e-mail to our campus communities.
Workshop Organizer/Host: Mark Berman of Williams College
Date/Time:
Tuesday, February 08, 2005
9:30am - 2:45pm
Registration begins at 8:30am
Location:
College of the Holy Cross
Hogan Campus Center, Fourth Floor - Suite A
Worcester, MA
Click
Here for a Map
Click Here for Directions
Special instructions:
Pricing:
NERCOMP Members: $73
Non-Members: $173
By clicking on the "Register" button below, you are indicating a commitment to attend and will be held responsible for the registration fee.
Registration is not yet open for this event.
Your fee can be refunded if you notify us of a cancellation at least 7 days prior to the event via email to nercomp@nercomp.org.
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Additional Information
Event Schedule:
8:30am – 9:30am Registration and Coffee
9:30am – 10:15am Fixing Email
Speaker: Christopher Porter, Systems Engineering Regional Manager, IronPort
The SMTP protocol at the heart of Internet email may have a fatal flaw: It trusts you. Email users are rapidly losing trust in the medium due to increase in spam, viruses, phishing, and other forms of attack and fraud. However, it's not just one-sided. Solving problems with receiving mail means solving problems with sending mail, and vice-versa. We will discuss some of the industry solutions and what some companies are doing today with IronPort products and services.
10:15am – 10:30am Break
10:30am – 11:15am Evolution of E-Mail Architecture at Williams College
Speaker: Ashley Frost, Senior Network and Systems Administrator, Williams College
Electronic Mail has been a growth industry on college campuses for many years. Over the last few years keeping up with growth in traffic has been a challenge for systems administrators. This session will trace the ways that Williams College has responded to this challenge. Particular system bottlenecks will be discussed, along with architectural solutions to eliminate those bottlenecks.
11:15am – 12:00pm Fault-tolerant E-mail Architecture Speaker: Wyman Miles, Senior Security Engineer, Cornell University
While working as Manager of Infrastructure at Rice University, I developed their current e-mail system. It is a cluster of mail processing nodes and separate mail storage nodes, behind a pair of load balancing switches and various software to make the system appear to the end-user as a single host. The cluster is able to suffer a variety of failures or overload conditions and continue to process mail. Over time, Rice experienced power failures, networking failures, assorted computer hardware failures, and high load conditions caused by virus releases and mail bombs, without compromising mail services. This talk will cover not only the architecture itself, but various methods developed over time to monitor health and status, transparently balance mail processing workload as systems fail or faster hardware is purchased, and grow the system to accommodate more users or larger quotas.
12:00pm – 1:00pm Lunch
1:00pm – 1:45pm Open Source solutions for large email infrastructures Overview
Speaker: Ludovic Marcotte, Software Architect, Inverse
Email is key component in many infrastructures. This essential service must be fast, secure and reliable.
Attractive Open Source email solutions, such as Postfix, Cyrus IMAPd and Horde, are emerging and are being adopted for large-scale deployments. They are also often more stable and efficient than their proprietary counterparts and offer a longer life expectancy.
This presentation describes how a large-scale email infrastructure can be built on top of Open Source components. It also covers the maintenance and support of such infrastructure, the typical cost savings and how an existing email installation can be converted to a solution fully based on Open Source components.
1:45pm – 2:45pm – Panel Discussion
2:45pm End
Speaker:
Ashley Frost, Ludovic Marcotte, Wyman Miles, Chris Porter
Ashley Frost is a Senior Network and Systems Administrator at Williams College. He has primary responsibility for all Unix based network services at Williams, including the e-mail systems. Ashley graduated from Williams College in 1989 and stayed on at his Alma Mater to become the senior member of the Networks and Systems engineering staff.
Ludovic Marcotte brings you an expertise in the design and implementation of distributed and embedded systems, network infrastructures and security, mobile applications, relational databases and cross-platform applications development.
Before joining Inverse, Ludovic was working at Dessau-Soprin on the design and analysis of medical software. Furthermore, he participated to researches on security management through the use of biometric devices. Those applications were running principally on mobile and embedded systems.
Precursor, innovator and recognized as a privileged collaborator at Inverse, he is responsible, as a project manager and architect of numerous realizations like the project management software currently used at Inverse and by some of our clients. His knowledge of existing and emerging technologies combined with his business sense will ensure your project success.
Finally, in his free time, Ludovic has been contributing over the years to the development of many Open Source applications. He is actively developing four (4) GNUstep (a free implementation of the OpenStep specification) applications which run on many Unix systems or Mac OS X and are used by companies such as Eastman Kodak and thousands of people worldwide. Ludovic is also a contributing editor for the Linux Journal magazine.
Wyman Miles started working as a UNIX systems administrator in higher-ed in 1990 and, over the years, has worn many hats. Among various diversionary duties from systems administration, desktop support for a business school, helpdesk/call center support, software development, and managing a residential computing consultant program. While at Rice University, Wyman was responsible for five full time and several part time systems administrators, who oversaw a network of roughly 200 nodes, both UNIX and Windows. His group provided campus mail, DNS, DHCP, authentication, LDAP, and supported the academic lab network. In an effort to get back to his primary interest, information security, he joined the IT Security Office at Cornell University as a security engineer in August 2004.
Chris Porter has nearly 10 years of engineering experience in applications, computing, and security for the financial, government, Fortune 1000, entertainment, and university markets. He earned a M.S. and a B.S. in computer science at the Stevens Institute of Technology. Chris holds the position of Northeast US Regional Manager for Field Systems Engineers at IronPort and is focused on the technical aspects of IronPort customer engagements.
Related Media Files:
Contact Information:
Mark Berman
Hotel Information:
Rooms are available at the Comfort Inn, 426 Southbridge Street in Auburn, MA.
Please state that you are with NERCOMP and you will receive the reduced rate of $85, includes continental breakfast & internet access.
Call the hotel directly at: 1-508-832-8300
The room block will be held until January 24, 2005.
Technical Requirements:
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NERCOMP reserves the right to use any photographs or other mechanical recordings taken at NERCOMP events in promotional materials.
No mechanical recordings of any kind may be used at NERCOMP events without the prior written consent of NERCOMP organizers and presenters.
The views and opinions expressed at NERCOMP events do not necessarily reflect those of NERCOMP, nor does NERCOMP make any representation regarding the information presented at NERCOMP events.
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